Transmedia Project Level Design Tasks - Audience

Understanding the audience is an essential part of storytelling. Telling a great story to the wrong audience can make the story fall flat. The author of a transmedia project needs to identify who the audience for that project is and what its characteristics are. With this information in hand, the transmedia author can look at the project’s theme, genre and characteristics and make adjustments to either project or target audience as required.  

Audience Demographics

The demographic profile of your audience should tell you about their key characteristics – age, gender, race, ethnicity, where they live (urban, suburban, or rural), income level, price and time sensitivity, their favorite brands, and so on.

Audience Psychographic Profile

Psychographics is an approach used by marketers to understand the motivational and cognitive drives of a target audience. The psychographic profile tells you more about the personality, values, attitudes, lifestyles, social goals, and interests of your audience. A psychographic profile differs from the more traditional demographic profile of your audience, although they should be used together to get a better picture of the audience segments.

Psychographics can easily be misunderstood or incorrectly applied. It's quite common to contrast them with demographic variables such as age and gender, or with behavioral variables such as usage rate. In fact psychographic variables and the other major analytic variables work in concert. Each is related to the other and affects the other. A marketing approach that is focused solely on one such area can miss critically important information.

Psychographics remain a valuable tool in effective market segmentation, since lifestyle, attitude, emotions and preferences are crucial factors in analyzing how consumers and business people allocate their money. Demographic and behavioral analyses give detail and data, but psychographics is needed for understanding the consumer in depth. (Market Segmentation Services, 2008)

Content Consumer Type
The type of content consumer your audience is will influence how you structure your transmedia narrative. For example, if you find that the majority of your audience consists of single story consumers that are only going to stick you for one story you may want to rethink the whole transmedia approach.

A good story well told may keep single media consumers coming back if you provide them with a series of live action videos but you risk losing them if one episode of your transmedia narrative is video and the next is a comic book and the third is a live event. Perhaps the best strategy is to find one medium that works for most of that audience for the core of the narrative and have a limited number of extensions win other media.

It is the audience that consists of transmedia consumers that you are looking for. These are the consumers who embrace stories told across many different media. These are the ideal transmedia consumers. However, the concept of transmedia narratives is so new that it will take time for the mass audience to become use to this form of storytelling. The best strategy is to exceed this audience’s expectations and have them serve as evangelists for the transmedia project.

Transmedia Project Level Design Tasks - Overview & Purpose

In the next few posts, we'll look at the top level set of design tasks involved in a transmedia project. A number of key decisions need to be made very early in the design process for a transmedia project. These decisions will shape the direction in which the project will develop, so the transmedia designer needs to consider them carefully.

The Transmedia Project Level Design Tasks table outlines a series of tasks the transmedia narrative designer should do at the start of the project.There is no strict sequence in which the design tasks at the transmedia project level need to be completed once the project has been initiated. Much of the transmedia design process involves multiple iterations as the purpose of the project defined, audience research data is gathered, and general structure of the project is developed. However, all of the transmedia project level design tasks should be largely complete before work begins on the details of the storyworld and stories.

Transmedia Project Level Design Tasks

Initiate transmedia project

Create transmedia project tagline

Identify the purpose of the project

Identify audience demographics

Develop audience psychographic profile

Identify content consumer type

Identify user gratifications

Identify audience media usage

Identify user segments

Identify media/platforms that will be used

Determine project type

Determine if the project is intercompositional or intracompositional

Definition of Transmedia Projects

If the planned project tells one or more stories based in the same storyworld and uses two or more media, it is a transmedia project based on the criteria set out in this thesis. This definition is less stringent than the American Producers Guild (APG), which requires at least three stories told across multiple media. A strict interpretation of the APG definition favors intercompositional transmedia narratives while eliminating intracompositional transmedia narratives from consideration as transmedia projects. The less stringent definition is used here so that both intracompositional narratives (a single story told across multiple media) and intercompositional narratives (multiple stories told across multiple media) can be included as transmedia narratives.


Transmedia Project Tagline

The transmedia project tagline is a single-sentence hook that “teases” potential users about what the project “will achieve or what questions it raises from an experiential point of view” (Hayes G. P., 2011, p. 4). The best taglines include the user with the term “you” (e.g. “Your journey into the dark heart of Wall Street”, “How do you save a man condemned to death?”, etc.).

Purpose of Transmedia Project

The purpose of a transmedia project will influence the intended message, how the content should be presented, and how users will navigate through the project. Designing a transmedia narrative for entertainment but targeting users who are looking for specific, factual information is likely to frustrate those users.

If the transmedia project is intended for educational or informational use, the users are known as “knowledge seekers”. These “knowledge seekers” are characterized by their interest in finding information related to a very specific topic (Lawless & Schrader, 2008, p. 271). When navigating the web, these users typically go to screens that contain information that increased their comprehension of the topic of interest. They are strategic in the selection of links and tend to move toward the content as quickly and directly as possible.

A transmedia narrative intended for entertainment, on the other hand, is likely to have a large number of users who are “feature explorers”. “Feature explorers” are characterized by their tendency to spend a disproportional amount of time interacting with the most noticeable features of the transmedia narrative (i.e. videos, animations, sound effects, etc.) (Lawless & Schrader, 2008, p. 271). This type of user typically spends more time learning the features of the transmedia environment than understanding the content.

Players of alternate reality games might be considered an extreme example of the “feature explorer” type. For ARG players much of the pleasure comes from exploring the features of the created environment to discover clues that will allow them to move forward in the game.
The purpose of the transmedia project will shape the message the user is intended to receive. A marketing and branding transmedia project will have a message that ultimately promotes a specific product, service, or brand. A transmedia narrative focused on activism may have a message that argues one side of a social or political issue. That message may be very pointed, like the perspective Collapsus presents on the perils of industrial society’s dependence on petroleum products, or it may have a more subtle but still clear point of view on modern industrial society as in Animism: The Gods’ Lake.

It is not necessary to take an either/or approach to determining the purpose of the transmedia narrative but one purpose should be dominant. For example, an educational/informational transmedia can be entertaining, but the entertainment value should be secondary and designed to support the primary purpose without distracting from it. Hayes identified a number of points that can serve as examples of what to look at when identifying the purpose of a transmedia project (Hayes G. P., 2011, p. 16):

• Purpose from a user perspective
  
  • Stimulate community-based storytelling
  • Get the audience to be highly active during a live broadcast
  • Create deeper engagement between scheduled events
  • Get the audience to become active outside the home
  • Stimulate massive community created content contribution
  • Make the service highly personalized
  • Develop a powerful “tease” service to a must-view linear property
• Purpose from the author perspective
  
  • Reach a younger or older demographic
  • Experiment with never before tried multi-platform concepts
  • Improve the skills of the creative team
  • Raise awareness of issues, social good, or other media property
  • Build a strong female or male viewership
  • Build a loyal local and/or international community for a creative property
  • Increase the overall audience

Transmedia Narratives - Bibliography from Thesis

Rather than trying to include a bibliography of citations in the individual posts on this blog, I've decided to list the entire bibliography here. In addition to referencing individual aspects of the blog posts, this bibliography can provide a useful guide to literature relevant to transmedia narratives.


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Story Structure & Transmedia Narratives

The structure of a story has a significant impact on how users extract meaning from it. By controlling the order in which information is presented to the reader, by providing or withholding pieces of information, the author is able to affect the extent of the reader’s involvement and how the reader perceives events and characters (Hodgins, 2001, p. 172). A narrative’s structure should serve to pull it together into a unified and coherent whole.

Narrative representations must be thematically unified and logically coherent. Their elements cannot be freely permuted, because they are held together in a sequence by relations of cause and effect, and because temporal order is meaningful. The propositions of a narrative representation must be about a common set of referents (= the characters). (Ryan, 2001)

While transmedia technologies provide tremendous opportunities to scatter elements of a story across multiple media, authors should use those opportunities judiciously.

The story should model itself in ways that readers consume stories – meaning that to simply fragment a story across multiple platforms won’t work…Dragging readers/audience from one platform to another simply “because you can” won’t work. There’s a danger of overkill and hosting ‘parties’ at venues where nobody will turn up. (Norrington, 2010)

Ryan noted that while there are differences between different types of media, there are “significant similarities in the processes of narrative communication” (Ryan, Introduction, 2004, p. 59). Abbott notes that there are elements that are common across narratives and media, but the things in stories that have always engaged people are (Abbott, 2005, p. 531):

• Linked strings of cause and effect
• Characterization and motivation
• The dense interweaving of micro- and macro-plots

Temporal Order & Narrative Design

One of the biggest challenges in writing for transmedia narratives is figuring out how to handle the contradiction between the inherently linear nature of narratives and non-linear nature of transmedia. Understanding temporal ordering as it relates to narrative design is an important aspect of the overall transmedia narrative design process.

Most definitions of “narrative” and “story” refer to a sequence of events. This implies a temporal order to the events – this happened, then this happened, and then this. A defining characteristic of narrative is that there is a sense of the precedence of the event; that the event or events occurred prior to the telling of the story and that the story was already there, in place to be rendered (Abbott, 2005, p. 535).

As a form of telling, narrative exists in time; a narrative takes time to tell and tells about a sequence of events in time. (McClean, 2007, p. 193)

Because traditional narrative has been structured on the sequential recounting of events, the traditional narrative form is essentially linear.

Although some have considered the notion of nonlinearity as a narrative form, the dominant structure in commercial feature-length film remains faithful to Aristotle’s beginning-middle-end, even if in some instances the syuzhet is such that only in the last frames is the spectator in a position to make the linkages form the whole. In commercial cinema, the whole itself, however its problems are presented, most often will conform to the classical narrative structure. (McClean, 2007, p. 29)

A variety of techniques have been developed to modify the apparent temporal ordering of events and manipulate the sense of time in both written and cinematic forms of narrative. These techniques include the “flashback” and “flashforward” used in both novels and film. Film, a linear form of narrative because its very nature requires the projection of a sequence of frames at a specific number of frames per second, has developed a number of techniques for manipulating the sense of temporal ordering in a narrative. In addition to flashbacks and flash forwards, these techniques include (Van Sijll, 2005):

• Slow motion (time expansion)
• Fast motion (time compression)
• Freeze frame (stopping time)
• Intercutting (showing simultaneous events in sequential time)

Source: Peter von Stackelberg

Events in a linear narrative are in a fixed temporal order.

The flexibility of transmedia narratives makes it possible to present events in any order. Interfering with the linear sequencing of a narrative, however, can impede the viewer’s ability to understand the meaning of the narrative. Issues of temporal ordering in narratives are tightly linked with user interactivity. Ryan stated: “Interactivity breaks the linear flow of narrative and removes control from the designer.” (Ryan, 2005, p. 515).
Nonlinear narratives give readers options of where to go and what to do within the narrative. There are two main categories of nonlinear narratives – open world (see Figure 5) and branching (McIntosh, Cohn, & Grace, 2010) – that are often incorporated into games.

The open world often means the player is able to encounter different parts of the overall story in whatever order they choose, or the player is able to access smaller, more isolated side stories in whatever order they choose (McIntosh, Cohn, & Grace, 2010).

The open world approach is typically used in “quest” type games in which missions can be carried out in any order.

Branching nonlinear stories are generally thought of as one of two styles: 1) a tree that branches out with different end points; or 2) plot lines that converge or diverge like parallel roads to the same destination (McIntosh, Cohn, & Grace, 2010).

Stories that branch to different end points are difficult to implement because the combination of possible endings rapidly multiplies as the number of decision points increases, causing significant programming and asset management challenges (McIntosh, Cohn, & Grace, 2010). Stories that use the parallel narrative approach can provide users with numerous options but because the story lines converge back to key plot points, the number of possible paths and end points are more easily controlled, making programming and asset management significantly easier (McIntosh, Cohn, & Grace, 2010).
Nonlinear narratives have a number of inherent challenges. From a production perspective, nonlinear narratives require more time and resources to design and develop because they need to accommodate every possible choice made available to the user, resulting in more difficult development and greater expense (McIntosh, Cohn, & Grace, 2010). Experiments with hypermedia in the 1980s and 1990s produced a number of attempts at non-linear narratives, but as a form of writing they were not a great commercial success.

Hypertexts sacrifice [a] dimension of literary narrative, namely the reader’s immersion in the stream of narrative time. The fragmentation of the hypertext format stands in the way of the feverish anticipation that we call ‘reading for plot’. There are no thrillers, no suspense stories, no dramatic curves of rising and falling tension in hypertext fiction. (Ryan, 2005, p. 522)

Source: Peter von Stackelberg
Open worlds allow readers to access the events in the narrative in any order.

Source: Peter von Stackelberg
Branching narratives have a temporal sequence but users are able to make choices at certain decision points.

Source: Peter von Stackelberg

Parallel narratives allow users choices but eventually converge back to key events.


The creation of suspense in narrative is “highly dependent on the management of what the reader knows and does not know at each moment of the reading experience” (Ryan, 2005, p. 522). When the reader decides the sequence in which the narrative is read, the author loses the ability to control the disclosure of information and the revelation of the story’s plot.

Since it is regulated by the one-directional relations of causality, psychological motivation, and temporal sequence, narrative meaning cannot be freely created by the reader, and it cannot emerge from a partially random combination of textual fragments. (Ryan, 2005, p. 523)

The control of information – what is disclosed to the reader and when – is considered a key aspect in the creation of interesting transmedia experiences.

The key to an interesting transmedia experience is to not give anything away. Rather than providing the entire website, begin by reading the book. Then provide the website and see if they can figure out the password to get in. Once they learn about shipbreaking today, get them to think of other topics that could be used as the foundation for a story. (Lamb & Johnson, n.d.)

Spatial ordering of events is an important aspect of creating a narrative. Spatial ordering entails the creation of places, entities, and paths of motion in space. In order to make sense of the story, use spatial information to build and update cognitive maps of the storyworld (Ryan, Introduction, 2004, p. 64). Ryan said that authors of narratives need to rely on the reader’s “basic capacity for spatial navigation and their general knowledge of how to navigate particular aspects of the world” (Ryan, Introduction, 2004, p. 66).


While games give users considerably more flexibility in terms of interactions, temporal ordering is still an important consideration. Games are almost always structured to play out chronologically.

Flash-forwards are highly problematic, since to describe events-to-come would mean the player’s actions did not really matter. Using cut-scenes or in-game artifacts, it is possible to describe events that led to the current fictional time, but an interactive flashback leads to the time machine problem: The player’s actions in the past may suddenly render the present impossible. This is the reason why time in games is almost always chronological. (Juul, 2005, p. 148)

Richard Saul Wurman said there was a finite number of ways – five specifically – to organize information: time, location, alphabetically, by category, and in hierarchies (Wurman, 2001, pp. 40-41).

Each way of organizing permits a different understanding; each lends itself to different kinds of information; and each has certain reassuring limitations that will help make the choices of how the information is presented easier. (Wurman, 2001, pp. 40-41)

Time works best as a way to organize information about events that happen over fixed durations. Time is also an easily understood framework from which changes can be observed and comparisons made (Wurman, 2001, pp. 40-41). Location is “the natural form to choose when you are trying to examine and compare information that comes from diverse sources of locales” (Wurman, 2001, pp. 40-41).

When you arrange information, the structure you create will save you the frustration of juggling unconnected parts…Understanding the structure and organization of information permits you to extract value and significance from it.” (Wurman, 2001, p. 42)

Jenkins said that any given product in a transmedia storyworld should be able to serve as a “point of entry into the franchise as a whole” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 96). However, he notes that too much may have been made of the “non-linear nature of the transmedia experience” (Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clintion, & Robison, 2009).


Although transmedia technology makes it possible to express a story in any temporal or spatial order, the demands of narrative may push many transmedia narratives to a more linear structure.

If you are going to take a world and express it through multiple media at the same time, you might need to express it sequentially. You may need to lead people into a deep love of the story. Maybe it starts with a game and then a film and then television. You are building a relationship with the world rather than trying to put it all out there at once. (Jenkins, 2006, p. 126)

The Challenges of Designing Transmedia Narratives

The nature of transmedia narratives brings with it a host of information design challenges. The individual elements of a transmedia narrative – text, images, audio, video, and other forms of media – present their individual opportunities and challenges.

“Each medium has its own affordances, its own systems of representation, its own strategies for producing and organizing knowledge. Participants in the new media landscape learn to navigate these different and sometimes conflicting modes of representation and to make meaningful choices about the best ways to express their ideas in each context.” (Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clintion, & Robison, 2009, pp. 87-88)

The creation of transmedia narrative involves not just how to work with different media, but also working with the production cultures associated with those media. For example, there are significant production culture differences between film, TV and theatre production, digital media production, and book production (Jeffery-Poulter, 2001, p. 155).

“In transmedia projects that involve distinct media which are part of existing creative production cultures, a practitioner needs to not only understand the affordances of the medium, but be able to negotiate the associated industries.” (Dena, Transmedia Practice: Theorizing the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World Across Distinct Media and Environments, 2009, p. 64)

In addition to the affordances of the individual media in a transmedia narrative, a whole new set of challenges occur when trying to integrate several different media into a cohesive and coherent overall narrative. The diverse set of knowledge and skills required to author a transmedia narrative is a major challenge.

“These works require a different kind of knowledge and skill. A creator may be well versed in writing novels and screenplays, but not necessarily skilled in writing stories that begin in a novel and continue in a film, in the rhetoric necessary to guide their reader to become a player, and even in understanding the combined effort these media platforms have on experience.” (Dena, Transmedia Practice: Theorizing the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World Across Distinct Media and Environments, 2009, p. 5)

The process of creating a coherent story or set of stories across multiple media is significant.

“One very large and persistent problem has always been creating authentic transmedia stories – natural story arcs and bridges that lead you onward through a long format, multi platform experience.” (Hayes, 2010)

Much is still unknown about the process of creating effective transmedia narratives. The current stage of transmedia narrative has been compared to the silent film era when new creative approaches for moving pictures were being developed (Kohn, 2011). From a creative perspective, transmedia narrative projects will require changing how storytelling is done and transform the art of storytelling (Hoefs, 2011). The aesthetic criteria for evaluating transmedia works are still poorly defined (Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, 2006, pp. 96-97), presenting another challenge as the field develops.

Transmedia Narratives: Why Bother?

Creating a transmedia narrative can be a complex, time consuming, and frustrating task. So why bother? Aren't books or film or stage productions or any of the other older forms of telling stories just as good?

The full possibilities of transmedia narratives have yet to be realized, but the transmedia works published over the past decade have shown they can be a powerful form of storytelling that lets users delve more deeply into the world of the story. Ed Sanchez, a member of the Blair Witch production team, said:

“What we learned is that if you give people enough stuff to explore, they will explore. Not everyone will but some will. The people who do explore and take advantage of the whole world will forever by your fans, will give you an energy you can’t buy through advertising…It’s this web of information that is laid out in a way that keeps people interested and keeps people working for it. If people have to work for something they devote more time to it. And they give it more emotional value.” (Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, 2006, p. 103)

Transmedia narratives have attracted the attention of the film, television, and publishing industries because of the creative and business opportunities they present.

“Transmedia storytelling uses the tools of the storyteller – emotion, engagement, universal themes, personal connection, and relevance – to create a communication experience instead of a message.” (Rutledge, 2011)

“The transmedia approach is such a powerful storytelling technique because it enables the user to become involved in the material in an extremely deep way and sometimes in a manner that eerily simulates a real-life experience. By spanning a number of media, a project can become far richer, more detailed, and multifaceted.” (Miller, 2008, p. 152)

Richer, deeper experiences that rise above the “digital noise” are helping drive the adoption of transmedia storytelling as the “new standard for 21st century communication”(Rutledge, 2011). One indication of the growing importance of transmedia narrative is the recognition of the title “Transmedia Producer” by the Producers Guild of America (PGA). The emergence of transmedia narratives is likely to significantly disrupt the entertainment and communications industries (Kohn, 2011).

The emergence of transmedia narratives has taken the process of creation of communication to an unprecedented level of sophistication, in the process significantly increasing the complexity of information design.

“Each increase in the complexity of our communications vehicles – the moves from pictographic languages to abstract alphabets or from cave painting to digital image manipulation – has been motivated by the desire to improve the range and richer of meaning we can share.” (Macy, Anderson & Krygier, 2000)

While the technology of transmedia is 21st century, the content that it carries is as old as the human ability to communicate about things that have meaning to us.

The critical issue, however, is how the information provided is designed so it engages users, drawing them into the storyworld more deeply without losing them. An effective transmedia narrative is more than a collection of story elements or stories scattered across a number of different media. It involves the careful user engagement design, narrative design, and interaction design to create a narrative that draws user in, keeps them engaged, and helps them move seamless through the storyworld.

More experience with transmedia narratives will help content creators develop new ways of combining media platforms and producing exciting new storytelling experiences (Miller, 2008, p. 162). Chris Weaver, a scholar in the field of media studies, said that there have not yet been any creators of transmedia works that have been able to successfully construct a unified project that harnesses the power of each medium (whether through the producer's skills or collaboration with other creative people) to its largest potential (Leavitt, 2010).

The purpose of this blog is to provide some of the insights that will help transmedia narrative designers move towards the construction of those unified projects.