Transmedia Storytelling

Transmedia storytelling is the act of telling a story or creating a shared story world across multiple media and platforms with which audience members can engage or interact with in some way. This interaction can be as simple as the process of actively clicking links or searching out different story pieces, but it is an important component of transmedia storytelling.

A fairly new term, transmedia storytelling can be a somewhat nebulous category. Although this project incorporates elements of fictionality, documentaries and other works of non-fiction can also be told through transmedia storytelling.

While the use of digital media is not a presequisite for a body of work to be a transmedia story, digital mediums are common as they lend themselves to transmedia because of the way that they facilitate intertextuality and audience participation.

Transmedia storytelling is, in essence, worldbuilding. It’s the creation of a story universe which exists overlayed and intermingled with our own universeIt’s a collective, transformative, and intertextual process which is endlessly open to new texts and interpretations. It stands perhaps not in opposition, but in contrast to more older and more well known forms of monomediatic storytelling, such as the novel, which is individually authored, closed, and non-participatory. It echoes, however, even earlier forms of storytelling, mirroring myth, folk processes and oral storytelling traditions