By Karim Ahmad
This is part 3 in a series of posts I’ve been obsessively writing on storyworlds. Part 1 was published on Indiewire, where I discussed the advantage of creating a spreadable storyworld for any piece of content. Part 2 was published right here, where I shared some takeaways from ITVS’ first major foray into building an immersive fictional web series – our fifth and final season of FUTURESTATES. Here, in part 3, I want to talk about another approach to building community through storyworlds that we’ve just recently adopted. A leaner approach.
The biggest drawback to the FUTURESTATES model was that we had to spend a lot of time and money before anything launched. And when you spend more time building in silence than you do sharing your creations, you can’t maximize sustained community engagement. But what if you could iterate an interactive story like FUTURESTATES over time? What if you could develop and prototype an immersive web series like any piece of software, and then audience test them like a TV pilot?
Right about now, the first thing that probably comes to mind – especially for those in the tech community – is a hackathon, now very popular in film circles too. The thing I find unsatisfying about hackathons is that while they’re great at getting creators creating – which is important, no question – the conditions are not conducive to achieving the best end result. Not if you’re looking to get some of these projects completed, that is. And that’s what ITVS aimed to do. Not just prototype, but also greenlight, produce, distribute, and engage. The first thing that this potential for higher investment required was more time to get the concept right on the front end – more time to develop story, more time to develop the strongest intended user experience, and more time to find the right technology and the right team for the project.
That’s how we arrived at the concept for the ITVS Storylab – a fellowship style development fund for indie content creators interested in developing immersive narrative webseries for public media. A cross between a hackathon and a TV pilot, but with a dedicated amount of time to conceptualize on the front end.
We reached out to a talented group of indies – narrative filmmakers and transmedia storytellers – to solicit proposals for interactive web series concepts. In other words, serialized programs for the web that have some mechanism of user interaction built into the storytelling framework. It could be anything. Any platform, with any form of user participation built in, but the user had to have a role in the storytelling, to help build community.
The first thing we did was convene the creators we’d greenlit for development, at our offices, with ITVS staff and a handful of veteran interactive storytellers, all creators of transmedia fiction – because let’s be honest, this process is very different – and arguably a lot easier for nonfiction makers. They’ve been doing it longer, they have plenty of models they can follow, and there are just a lot more resources for nonfiction digital storytellers out there. Transmedia fiction, on the other hand, is the wild west, raw and untamed, unfettered by reality. Wide open.
The case studies we laid out fell into two basic categories: projects that utilize existing platforms, and projects that create their own platforms. This, in my mind is the first critical question anyone moving into interactive storytelling needs to ask themselves. Scratch that. The real first questions are, who is your audience and what do you want them to think and feel? That informed everything, including story and platform. But once you have those questions answered, you need to ask yourself how you plan to reach that audience, and what their consumption patterns look like. After all, it is notoriously difficult to draw a viewer to a standalone site.
These were the questions we wanted to make sure that all of these creators understood and had well-thought-out answers for. So we basically locked them in our offices for two days to think and talk about it, without even starting to design and code. Just paper prototyping. And it’s amazing what you can come up with in just 2 days.
After that, we sent them all home to take a few weeks to shoot some media to work with – stills, audio, video, anything they could to approximate their series content for the prototype – while we secured designers, developers, and technology partners, each one tailored for each specific project’s needs, so that in a few weeks time they could reconvene and build a first iteration of their web series concepts; to test the user interaction with their series, and how they plan to use that interaction to extend the story and build community around it.
That’s where we are now. Just this morning, our teams have reconvened to begin their builds. It’s been pretty exciting. A totally new way to look at creating story, with an emphasis on creating numerous access points for content, and user interaction built into the story’s DNA to allow for community building. That’s the great thing about shifting your approach from linear story creation to world-building – you can create a near infinite amount of ways to invite others into your creation, and allow them to play in that sandbox. We’re neck deep in it this week, and I look forward to inviting you to play our sandboxes too.
As always, I look forward to sharing our process and its outcomes. ITVS is just one of several organizations approaching interactive and episodic media creation and support in new ways, and the more we all share our processes with each other, the better we all are at what we do and what we can create. Join me.
Karim Ahmad is the Senior Digital Content Strategist at the Independent Television Service (ITVS). You can follow him on Twitter: @the_karachi_kid
Karim will be participating with Ted Hope, Michel Reilhac, Liz Rosenthal, Tiffinay Shlain, and Lance Weiler on Wednesday, May 28th at 11A PT on the interactive think tank talk show: ReInvent Hollywood. You can read more about the specific episode here, where Karim also shares some examples of what he feels are good examples of the “new look of storytelling”.
