From Screenhub: Transmedia and Jeff Gomez: from the bible to Middle Earth to Coca-Cola to Melbourne
by: David Tiley
Screen Hub, Wednesday 21 July, 2010
Jeff Gomez, transmedia proselyte, is a high priest of a development model which proves there actually is a secret conspiracy to control us all. This is something you should probably know.
Jeff Gomez, who owns Starlight Runner Entertainment, has one of the best roles in the screen sector. In public he is called a transmedia producer - a role he helped develop - but his task is actually much deeper than that.
Transmedia producers manage the spread of a project across its attendant media and ancillaries, which can encompass comics, novels, music, toys, spin off series, webisodes, and the vast range of product-based tie-ins, which in turn can involve the placement deals. It is about spreading the brand, creating new connections and opportunities, tracking the monetisation, and resolving the complex intellectual property issues. It is connected to the original property, to project income, to marketing, and the management of fans.
This is not about plonking a character on a shirt, or a doll in a toyshop. To the proselytes like Gomez, the task is to tell important stories related to the original material across the range of material. It is called transmedia storytelling.
On the phone, Jeff cited the webisodes for Battlestar Galactica as an elegant example. "Things were revealed about ancillary characters, or terrestrial creatures or certain concepts that could be viewed independently but gave you new insight into the characters and concepts of the show." he said. "They made you want to go back to the show, and re-examine their characters and motivations – that’s a great transmedia mutation because it caused you to look at the ancillary and rethink whats going on in the main content."
This makes sense as a marketing tool. The ancillaries reach far beyond the film, and can be made to point back to it. "Look at District Nine", he said, "and its marketing. Almost everything in that marketing was canonical. That makes it fascinating, and helped to build the level of interest in the film. You are paying for that if you are a studio. However, you might also accrue a number of licensees for the tee shirts and magazine and comic books and toys, based on your IP. Why not go further and give them bits of canonical content so you are simultaneously licensing the content, and nurturing the storyworld? That is a major rethink for many of our clients to get that."
To do this, the story elements have to be distributed across the media, and therefore ruthlessly consistent. Indeed, the central property has to be able to bear the strain of all this extra material. This is far more elaborate than ensuring all the properties enhance the brand - it cuts to the heart of the script and the world it creates and inhabits.
This is the bit that creates a model of development which explains just why and how the big tentpole franchises are filling our multiplexes - a process which can be subverted for our more modest purposes.
Gomez is creating bibles for films or television series which go far beyond the bible as we understand it in series production, although we are familiar with the basic notion. It is an intricate description of the world, the characters, the connections, timelines, backstory, any fantastical elements or conventions or special devices. It articulates, binds and bounds everything.
He used the example of Tolkien, saying, "Middle Earth was built on an enormous amount of research and development. A hyper-elaborate bible with a whole language and world was made before he wrote 'The Hobbit'. So what we are building is closer to that model. A platform neutral development of the storyworld."
The part of his role which is surely the most entrancing is this: he builds the universe of the film, which is the basic creative armature, and could extend to be an entire mythology. "Starlight Runner is very well known for its mythological texts," he said. "They are one of the most tantalising things we produce – rarely seen but often discussed. Those mythologies contain much more than you see in a bible. They contain detailed chronologies, details of how the fantastic elements work, or the brand message or content for transmediality. How best to extend across platforms."
That term "brand message" is important. Gomez and Starlight are comfortable working in the commercial sector, creating and extending iconic brands. Forbes has a lovely interview, which contains his description of Starlight's work with Coca-Cola. Based on the Happiness Factory commercial, he was asked to develop enduring transmedia storylines.
"As with most of our clients, our first major milestone for Coke was a franchise mythology", Jeff told Forbes. "This is a visually impressive guide to the people, places, history and devices of the fictional universe. We get into the cultures and mysticism, messages and themes, everything you need to know to produce dozens, even hundreds, of hours of content from this world.
For Coke we also produced a transmedia rollout 'blueprint,' strategizing how Happiness Factory can play across comic books, videogames, outdoor interactive ads and other media across the globe over the course of the next several years. We're only scratching the surface so far, but the vision is truly ambitious."
The value of this work for franchise films is obvious. Gomez was involved in the development of Pirates of the Caribbean, and the upcoming reversioning of Tron. I asked him if it is relevant to medium or low budget cinema, which dominates our sector. I expected him to say no.
"Absolutely," he replied. "We have a class of clients who are involved in low to mid budget feature films. And with transmedia built around them."
"One of the most fascinating developments of independent filmmaking in recent months, or the past year or so is the fact that if include a section on transmedia in your prospectus, you are more likely to get an investor because they are seeing you are going to make an effort to monetise across different media platforms like comics and novels. You are laying the foundations for a larger franchise to come.
"Starlight Runner is now engaged in projects with indy and low budget filmmakers who are interested in giving us credits as coproducers and equity, in return for us providing the transmedia implications under their budgets. And we of course do that for a greatly reduced price because we are getting equity in the property."
In his recent Kidscreen article, Gomez quietly introduces an idea that takes the canonical universe concept into fundamental territory.
"It all starts with getting a clear understanding of the property at hand," he wrote. "Who is your hero? Who is the villain? What is this fictional universe trying to say? You need to define the recurring themes, messages and archetypes that guide the central narrative of your property and describe the vision of the original creator."
What is the canon, the "property's essence?" It is worth quoting in detail. "You have to uncover the unique elements of your story that make it resonate with the audience. Ask yourself the basic questions: What are you trying to say? Who are you trying to reach? What's the appeal of the story? It's simple stuff, really, but the vital importance of these details are often overlooked in their vital importance. Two dudes in robes, whacking each other with light sticks does not equal Star Wars. The theme that George Lucas infuses into each piece of the Star Wars story is the importance of finding peace within yourself before you can bring balance to your world. And it's the presence of this theme that authenticates each new addition to the universe."
In other words, it turns on a coherent theme or meaning, which infuses all the material, and creates the fundamental consistency.
I asked him to describe the bible for The Pirates of the Caribbean. "It is not easy to find the beating heart of the meaning of the pirate’s franchise. It is proprietory," he replied.
"I will ask you to think about in considering Pirates of the Caribbean is actually something that Johnny Depp said about Jack Sparrow – he is almost as if he is wobbling on some kind of tightrope as he walks, and that is a very interesting notion. Jack Sparrow is a character who walks the line between nobility and savagery – he is really a kind of noble dude under all that dress and attitude and swagger. But at the same time, he aspires to be free and savage and wild as a pirate."
This is an informal account, late at night from Los Angeles, of the ideas that evolved in the development of the film, and its franchise. So far, it looks like traditional development, given added rigour by the necessity to communicate it across media, bring in other storytellers, and create a world rich enough to incorporate the additional material.
Indeed, transmedia producers have been accused of staying inside the comfortable world of traditional storytelling. John Tarnoff hopped onto the Variety article, to say, "You miss the key point of Transmedia: interactivity. Just because you’re building a world from the beginning doesn’t mean somehow that you are doing anything different from what marketers do in the process of selling traditional media..." In the comments, Jeff Gomez agreed with him.
In our interview, after talking about work that Starlight does for the US government and NGOs to create transmedia content for populations not reached by traditional linear media, he said, "It is happening and remarkable, and it has its hazards. We have to be careful that such a powerful experience is not abused by those who are implementing it. We take care to fully define transmedia stories as a dialogue as opposed to a broadcast. Without the ability of the audience to talk back it is simply not transmedia, and we have no interest in that."
He spoke about interactivity and the social conversation by talking about football. "You used to love your football, and gathered together in giant stadiums and talk with one another about it, through an array of media platforms and immerse yourself in the minutiae of the sport because it was so available to you."
Then, of course, football fragmented and moved to television. But it still kept ways by which the audience can, as he called it, "commiserate amongst itself". As the technology expands, that need to belong to an "aspirational world" has grown enormously. He is reminding us that social experience is fundamental, and pungent, and driven by dialogue. In transmedia, communicators are acutely conscious that the experience - like sport, ultimately - is driven by story.
"The net thing brings us full circle back to the shaman telling stories around the fire. Keep in mind that our sense of narrative, our central experience of narrative, only arose with the advent of the industrial revolution. We can now share a movie together, or move ourselves to the theatre.
"It used to be that story was a vast and messy thing, told in such a way as to have your audience’s attention and response immediately. And for you to adjust what you are saying in the light of that response – the shaman had better satisfy the chieftain or run the risk of being chucked off a cliff.
We are storytellers who are capable through technology of looking into the faces of the people we are talking to. We can adjust on the fly through an array of counterpoints. What transmedia storytelling really is, its brought us back to the Stone Age – to that magical sense of participatory narrative."
Then, Gomez said something truly surprising. "It is as simple and as powerful as Iran. Greater and more spectacultar things are happening, and about to happen. Transmedia in the entertainment world is rehearsal. Wait till you see what happens in the real world. It will be extraordinary."
Jeff Gomez can be found extensively on YouTube. Here is a pretty personal piece; the lack of a microphone to record the audience makes his speech a touch creepy - an effect which illustrates the difference between linear and interactive content.
Jeff Gomez is a guest of the next X|Media|Lab in Melbourne on July 28th.
David Tiley
David Tiley is the editor of Screenhub, and can be contacted at editor@screenhub.com.au. or 03 9690 6893.
XMediaLab thank's Screenhub for being able to post this article.
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