Musically Speaking – storytelling on a musical framework

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Since we started our own production company last spring (feel free to visit us here and sign up for the newsletter🙂 ) we’ve been working on a number of different projects, ranging from creating marketing campaigns to assisting with though leadership projects, from TV-series about YouTubers to GPS-based storytelling in a city-setting.

Although few of these would satisfy critical analysts as “true” transmedia projects, I find myself utilising transmedia storytelling and development methods at many turns, simply to get different pieces to fall into place in a logical and engaging fashion. Increasingly I’ve also been looking at other creative fields to find better analogies and better tools for creating and producing content, but also to explain my methods, my thinking and the end result to collaborators, clients and partners.

One area I have found extremely fruitful is that of music. It’s been touted – back in the days – that developing and producing a transmedia project is like conducting a symphony orchestra, where the producer is the conductor and the different instruments combine to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. While this still makes absolute sense, there are a lot of other musical terms that have a clear connection to multiplatform and transmedia development and production and can be used to jog ones creative nodes and. Allow me to exemplify with ten of them:

Beat

The unit of musical rhythm.

If there is anything that is essential for a well executed project that spans different media and strives to foster engagement, it’s the beat. Well planned and produced content with logical, well working calls to action and a rewarding scheme for people who engage in the intended way, can’t help but attract the desired attention. The beat is everything though; release too soon and people can be overwhelmed, release too infrequent and interest wanes.

But unlike classical music, there is one element here that has the possibility to act different. Since the audience’s role is to be engaged and active, they can influence the beat as well. Stories are legio of producers with a hit on their hands, having engaged audience members run through clues and mysteries in a fraction of the time expected. Said producers struggle to release new content and new mysteries to keep up with demand and try to stay the course, time wise. It might be better to stay with the intended beat, and instead plan for the creation of ancillary content or calls to action, that deliver engagement points but do not affect the general pacing.

Canon

 A musical form where the melody or tune is imitated by individual parts at regular intervals. The individual parts may enter at different measures and pitches. The tune may also be played at different speeds, backwards, or inverted.

With an engaging story and well produced content, we’ll have many people engaging, and not all at the same time. Thinking in terms of canon, how can we plan our content so that no matter who jumps into the narrative (or starts from the beginning while others are already way ahead) their experience and their voices add to the harmony instead of creating disharmony? One way is to foster and support an active community, which welcomes and integrates new members, helping them up to speed as necessary. Another way is to offer easy ways to grasp the narrative so far, with added points for further involvement as necessary.

Clef

In sheet music, a symbol at the beginning of the staff defining the pitch of the notes found in that particular staff.

Most people approach your content with some pre-conceived notions of what kind of experience they should be having. This is good, as long as those notions are not the completely wrong ones. While it sometimes might pay off to create something that offers the audience a shock treatment by deceiving them at the beginning of their experience, then revealing the true nature of the content, this is most of the time not something worth creating. Hoaxing has a tendency to backfire. So for most project, a clear indication prior to experiencing it, of what it is and how it is intended to be experienced, can’t but help the overall impression of the project.

Conductor

One who directs a group of performers. The conductor indicates the tempo, phrasing, dynamics, and style by gestures and facial expressions.

While the conductor could be considered to be you, the producer, the conductor could also be an inserted model participant, helping and guiding the audience along. At times you want to set the participating audience free, give them the control over the narrative. Many times, though, it is advisable to at least have a point of reference, some sort of guidance, to help the story and the experience along in the intended manner – or as a tool to help navigate unknown waters, should the overall project derail due to an overly engaged audience.

Encore

A piece of music played at the end of a recital responding to the audiences enthusiastic reaction to the performance, shown by continuous applause.

The long tail is a known figure of speech and a known way to engage the audience (and new audiences) in the long run. But the same goes for the experience itself; when the appreciating audience demands more, will you have anything for them? Can you at least lay out some rudimentary plans for how to evolve and prolong the experience; plans that make this prolonged experience feel logical and natural, and not as something that has been hastened along “due to popular demand”?

 

Fermata

To hold a tone or rest held beyond the written value at the discretion of the performer.

How much are you willing to let your performers – i.e. your audience – influence what’s going on? Ideally, they will take your project and the overall experience to heart fully, encompass your intentions for it and build upon it in a way that will purely add to the total of the experience for everyone. But opening up for total freedom will also mean you run the risk of being the target of deliberate troll attacks, and perhaps even more malicious ones than trolls. Now, this can be approached as merely a flattery – they care enough to troll you – or as a nuisance. One way to address this is to create the so called “sand boxes”, i.e. parts of the narrative where creativity and engagement are encouraged and the limitations are few or non-existent. Within these sand boxes, your performers can sing their hearts out or do whatever other creative thing they’d like.

Harmony

Pleasing combination of two or three tones played together in the background while a melody is being played. Harmony also refers to the study of chord progressions.

There are few things more challenging in storytelling or in content production than trying to get the narrative, the experience, to fully gel between different platforms. All platforms should support each other, every platform added to the experience should enhance it… but at the same time, simply experiencing ONE platform should be enough to get a fulfilling experience. The harmony can be achieved by experience, gut feeling, knowledge and extensive testing on the target audience.

 

Interlude

Piece of instrumental music played between scenes in a play or opera.

What is your interlude? What can your audience experience in the spaces between your installments? How are the interludes shaped, can they offer your audience a chance to create something themselves or interact with either characters, other audience members or someone else? How do they begin and more importantly how do they end – how do they build in a logical and engaging way towards the next installment of your content?

Polyphony

Combining a number of individual but harmonising melodies. Also known as counterpoint.

What you do NOT want is cacophony; that jarring experience of a multitude of pieces that do not fit together at all. Instead, while designing and producing, try to identify which parts of content could fit together in ways your audience might not expect. It could be the narrative of a side character that starts somewhere off grid, before anyone even knows it is a side character, but that is engaging and interesting in its own ways. It could be User Generated Content, contributions from fans or viewers, that offer a totally different view point (and based in Real Life) but still with a clear connection to the original narrative. Key is – they should all fit together.

 

Scordatura

The retuning of a stringed instrument in order to play notes below the ordinary range of the instrument or to produce an usual tone color.

How creative can you get? How can you use platforms and techniques in new ways that will give your audiences unexpected experiences? Can Periscope be used to tell a long form novel in “me” form? Can YouTube be used merely to create a soundscape for the overall experience? The sky’s the limit – retune your palette and your tool box as necessary (and if it sounds like crap, no worries; just tune it back and say “oops!”)

How to make your story resonate

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If there is one thing we all want it’s to be heard and recognized. Whatever the story we are telling is, we want it to reach someone and cause a reaction. Most of the stories we tell are personal, directed at one person or a small group, but some are intended for far larger audiences.

If you’ve been paying attention to the worlds of media, entertainment, marketing and B2B, there is one term that is right now the hottest one around. Storytelling is what everyone wants to be doing, or at least be perceived to be doing. All it’s different sub-layers – transmedia storytelling, creative storytelling, multiplatform storytelling, interactive storytelling… the list goes on and on – are geared towards the same end goal; to make a story resonate with an intended target audience and cause an intended reaction.

I’ve been writing passionately about storytelling in many different forms on this blog for the past few years. My focus has been on the transmedia part of storytelling, as I was and still am convinced that new media platforms offer new possibilities to reach and engage with audiences, and that ignoring the fact that different media platforms have different strengths and different weaknesses is downright stupid. If we can engage with an audience on a deeper and more effective level by shaping our content to fit different platforms, to not do so is above and beyond pure laziness.

As for the principles of how this could be done – and this is of course highly dependent on the field you’re in, the story you’re telling and the audience you want to reach (not to mention budget constraints, the territory you’re targeting etc and so on) – there are a number of posts around the web, and also here on this blog, relating to how it could and should be done. But once you’ve figured out the core of your story, the core of your story world, your target audience and your intended media platforms, there is still the all-important, elusive question of making your content resonate.

I read a post the other day that was intended for brands, looking at what stories they tell and how they achieve the intended result among the target audiences they are trying to reach. In the study, six different archetypes of stories were identified. What was interesting to me was that it was quite apparent that the stories the brands and their storytellers were the most interested in telling were not the ones the audience were the most interested in hearing.

The archetype “rags-to-riches” stood out as the one brands liked to tell the most. It is understandable, as it is a very classical story and story line, no matter what the core subject is, and it’s one that is easily pitched to anyone paying for the production. What people were more interested in, however, were the more complicated story lines – “riches-to-rags-to-riches” or vice versa – stories that dive deeper into the protagonists and their fates, and offer deeper insights and meanings.

People’s lives are complex matters, and while rags-to-riches stories might be convenient to create and produce, more complex stories also give more opportunities for target audiences to identify with the subject, while at the same time building the foundation for more intricate and complex interactivity and calls-to-action.

So, how to make our story, our content resonate? Here are three key principles:

1. Never settle for the first obvious solution. It’s like every other production of almost anything – that you create for the first time – in that when you think you’re 90% finished, you have about 90& left to do. Granted, you might get an epiphany so strong and so spot on, that you can just sit down, write it out, have it produced and achieve storming success. You would have a bigger chance of winning any given lottery though, so instead stay healthily critical towards that first, brilliant idea. Bounce it off everyone you can think of, including yourself. What are the weaknesses, what are the strengths, how does it build forward and how can it be bettered upon? Because believe me – it can be bettered upon.

2. Your audience is more important than your story. If you have a devoted audience and no story, there is a myriad of things you can accomplish. If you have a great story and no audience, you can’t do shit. If you feel your story and your content is on the weaker side, either as story goes or as interaction goes or as transmedia storytelling goes or according to any other principle, you already have your most important asset; use your audience to get it moving in the right direction. How can they mash it all up? How can you use what they create to better your content? How can it all build on each other, strengthening along the way, to something much better that you and your audience are both invested in? Revere and celebrate your audience, for without them you’re nothing.

3. Stay on it. When Red Bull started out in 2005 and 2006 they sponsored local hip hop contests and had some very brief videos of paragliders landing in Las Vegas. Not much to inspire, not much to resonate with. But now? Through a clear and – in hindsight – fairly obvious concentration on high energy extreme sports (including e-sports etc) their stories are the ones people associate with all things extreme sport today. But it took years and years, and carefully maintained strategies along the way to get to that point. If you’re convinced your story is solid and that is has an audience, analyze, tweak, release, and rinse and repeat. You can’t but achieve success if you manage to do this right.

If you have any great tips on getting content and stories to resonate, please share in the comments!

Chasing the story

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Regular readers of this blog know that I’m very much into storytelling, and almost as much into exploring how different media platforms can be utilized to create projects, story worlds and campaigns where the different parts build on each other, offering a total that is greater than the sum of its parts. Furthermore, how can the interactive nature of many of these platforms be harnessed in the best possible way, to achieve engagement and foster loyalty? And how do we harness this engagement in the long run – how do we grow our long tail to be as long as possible?

These are questions and challenges that differ from one project to the next, from one client to the next, from one target group to the next and from one story to the next.

For me though, it all starts with the story. What is the story we want to tell? What is the story world it is founded in? What are its siblings in the story-verse?

Having been involved in quite a few storytelling ventures, and having over the past few years consulted or evaluated a fairly great number of projects in the multiplatform / transmedia sphere, this is where a lot of them go wrong. Perhaps not totally, 100% wrong, but wrong enough that it matters and severely affects the end result.

This goes for industry clients, who have a difficult time identifying what the real story behind their product, service or innovation is. It goes for documentary filmmakers, who fail to see what stories align naturally with their original story from the film. And it goes for many other producers and creators, who fail in taking a step back and viewing their project from a further distance, seeing the limitations of the story they are currently promoting and working on, while another, adjacent story, would offer bigger, better and bolder opportunities.

So, how can we chase our story more efficiently? Here are three tools for anyone to use, that might put you on the right track – the only thing you need is a willingness to challenge your story as it stands today:

1. Use an audience. You have people around you, whether it is colleagues, partners, family, friends or someone else. Use them as a platform to get some distance to the story you’re trying to tell. Do like this: identify the core issues in the story you’re telling. Formulate them into a three-sentence description – i.e. “The countryside is slowly being depopulated. It’s an accelerating movement and there’s not much anyone is trying to do about it. The people living there have almost given up.”. Then ask your audience what questions or thoughts pop up in their minds. Mirror that against your current narrative and see how well you address those thoughts or answer those questions, and see if there are adjacent stories to your current narrative that would do that better.
2. Use the Internet. We have finally got access to the combined intelligence, knowledge and wisdom of the entire human race, from the ancient Greeks to the intellectuals of today. There is absolutely no need not to take advantage of this. In order not to drown in information though, searches and hashtags should be carefully selected; it is worth it to take a day or two to sift through information related to search terms, just to be able to find the ones that fit your needs best.
3. Use yourself. The most accessible way of doing this is to create a pitch for your project. Write down the elevator pitch of the story you’re writing. Rehearse it, and pitch it in front of a camera. Take a break, have a coffee, and then come back and watch the pitch you just made. If in doubt, have someone else watch it and give a verdict. Your approach should be – would I want to invest 100k in this person’s story? If not – why not? Rinse and repeat.

There are as many unique stories as there are people on this Earth, and probably quite a few more as well. There is therefore no need to settle for a story that doesn’t fit your needs exactly – all you need is to chase it down, pin it down and tell it!

Can we keep up? – reflections from Cartoon 360

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I’ve been attending the Cartoon 360 forum in Barcelona the past couple of days, listening to an taking part in pitches and discussions on a number of animation series with “360” or “transmedia” elements attached. There have been projects of every kind – epic animated films from Russia, series looking to help children and people living in dire circumstances (Scotland), grandmothers-as-secret-agents from Poland and so on.

The scope when it comes to how these are extended over platforms also vary wildly. There are projects that create their full story arch for TV, add a website and an app and feel that is enough, and then there are more creative ones looking into AR, VR, real life events etc, to add to the narrative.

Looking at the discussions and the talks here it is clear that there will be some time before everyone is playing the same ball game on the same pitch with the same goal in mind. It will also take some time to even get everyone involved to change into the requisite playing kit, as many are extremely comfortable in whatever they’re wearing right now.

The challenge is that the audience will not wait – and does not wait – for anyone to change into anything. If no one turns up on the pitch to start playing, our spectators are very used to climbing onto the pitch and start playing themselves. Once that has happened, it will be very difficult to establish any kind of control over the game, and the only solution might be to start a new game on a new pitch somewhere else, and try to get the audience to follow along over there.

I wrote a post a couple of months ago regarding “Five focus areas for successful multiplatform storytelling”. I strongly believe that many of the very established players in the entertainment media  geared towards children could benefit from developing these areas – namely sustainability | fluidity | validation | structure | clear goals.

I would also add a sixth area – collaboration. When looking at the pitches here and listening to the discussions around them it feels like many are enticed by the possibilities available in the “new media” world. Then, when it comes to bringing the possibilities in touch with ones own projects, it quickly starts to feel very complicated and perhaps not worth the effort. The key thing is that it is definitely worth it – we just need to find collaborators that can complement the skills and the content we bring to the table. What would take me hours upon hours and a lot of Googling and swearing to program, my coder-brother can fix in minutes, and the same goes for AR solutions, social media campaigning etc.

At the same time, these are exciting times to tell stories. The possibilities open to us as storytellers are of a magnitude no one else have ever experienced. The dangers of going astray are apparent, but the maps showing us safe areas and preferred roads to traverse are becoming more and more detailed by the day. It’s going to be a fun ride!

Lean content creation – together with the audience

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I’ve been fascinated by the lean development principles for quite some time. It is something that feels very right, very modern and very effective, even if the principles and the way of working might take some time getting used to and embracing – more or less time, depending on what kind of company you’re working for and what field you’re active in. Still, viable principles for creating great products and services that can reach a customer base.

What I’ve been thinking about, however, is how these notions of lean development could be brought into the content creation business. It’s a field that for a long time – and to quite an extent still – is crowded by creators, producers, writers, ”gurus” that come up with an idea, develop it (alone or together with someone else), produce it (again, alone or together with a company for instance) and realese it. Be it a book, a podcast, a documentary, a tv series, a blog or something else, the traditional way of going about it is to have the content originate somewhere, and then be placed in the hands of a smaller or bigger producing entity that releases it unto an audience when it’s ready.

A friend of mine wrote a blog post the other day on how they’ve – successfully – implemented the lean principles at the office he runs, and the ten steps lined up in the post makes perfect sense for a group of people working together towards a common goal.

Now, why could not these principles be transferable to the creation of content together with an audience? ”Make everything scale” is the first point on the list, and that would, in my mind, be an obvious principle to adhere to when it comes to a story or a story world you’ve created. If it’s possible to scale it will make room for the audience, for other creators, for new possibilities, for new media platforms… for just about anything your story would need.

The following points – ”Allow people to scale” and ”Leave your ego at the door” – would in a creator-plus-audience setting be just that – the letting go of control of the stories and world you’ve created, in favor of letting them grow with the help of the nurturing cares of a multiheaded audience, working together with the creator to create something bigger and better and more engaging and exciting.

And looking at the other points Jonas makes, they all make sense too, in such a setting. These are:

  • No ones owns their work (but how do I monetize? you cry out. As do I! But I believe we would need to think creatively about that as well – if you have a sizeable audience, selling the story to them is only one way to make a living out of the thing you’ve created. There are many, many others.)
  • Leaders don’t tell people what to do (here slight nudges might come in handy though, as well as some goals for the process on a whole and on a more direct leve, the story/stories)
  • Automate whenever you can. (Rhymes very well with the interconnected world we live in today, even if a creative process leaves less to automation than others.)
  • Be ready to kill your darlings. (In the same vein as the leaving your ego at the door-point, once we’ve let the audience in on working with us, our darlings will not necessarily be anyone else’s darlings)
  • Get a feedback loop going, Make your processes and goals clear and visible and No silos. (All point towards more transparency, more openness, an increased readiness to accept the views of others as being as viable as your own, even if you would be the original creator of the original idea).

Now, content will of course – for the foreseeable future – still follow along the traditional lines outlined at the beginning of this post. The creator creates, the audience receives. But the ones that get these points, the ones that feel that working lean in an audience-engaged contest… these creators, they will reap rewards that will make everyone else stand up and take notice.

Note – researching this post I found that others unsurprisingly are thinking along similar tracks. Check for instance out Ian Lamont’s posts on the same topic over here.

On the importance of long term thinking

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Over the past few years I’ve been involved in quite a few different storytelling projects. Some of them have been in the corporate field – helping companies tell the stories of the products, projects or people in ways that reflect the values and principles of said company. Increasingly I’ve also been happy to try to encourage a recognition of the fact that we all need to think long-term to cope with the pace and demands of today’s world.

Most people are in agreement today that storytelling is an integral part of any company’s identity. The craft and skill – and even art – of telling an engaging and informative story is more in demand today than ever before. The platforms used vary with the targets groups we want to reach and with the stories we want to tell, but the story (or stories) are at the heart of what we try to achieve.

I read an article the other day where the script writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely talked about their work with the world and the story arcs of Marvel, in connection with the latest Captain America movie. In it, they talk about long-term storytelling and about how the different parts of the Marvel universe necessarily affect each other – and do so in a positive, organic, sometimes unintentional way, that gives rise to new stories that are utterly believable and engaging.

The same goes for corporate storytelling today. In order to have an audience to pay attention to a brand message we need a strong story. But in order for the audience to fully immerse themselves in what the company, brand, product or service is about, we need interconnected stories that support each other and build over the long run.

Yes, a great 30 second spot is a great 30 second spot, but if they grow from a common story world, the next image, blog post, article, video, billboard or interview will build on the story from that brilliant ad, or at the very least enhance the strength of the story world they all have in common.

Think not of the people you want to reach, think of the people you want them to reach. And think not of the people you want to reach tomorrow, think of the people you want to reach a year from now.

Dancing on the point of a needle – the art of stitching stories together

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Recently I’ve been involved in evaluating and consulting on a number of projects touching on transmedia storytelling as well as virtual reality and generally striving to explore new territories and new ways of telling stories and reaching people.

A discussion I had with one of the projects led to an analogy that feels truer the more I think about it; it made sense in the context of that discussion, and it holds true for other projects as well. See, we’re a lot like handicraft artists ourselves – and in a sense, even seamstresses and tailors.

Anyone can sew. All you need are the required tools and materials – much like a storyteller. If you have a needle – or a computer, a camera, a sound recorder, or even just a pen or a mouth – and some thread – the story you want to tell – you can begin.

Everyone is not necessarily good at sewing, and talent does come into the picture. But just as with storytelling – and especially with regards to the tools we’re using – one does become better with practice. We might be looking to just mend something while sewing – that is, enhance a message or add to something already existing – but more challenging and more rewarding is to start with a blank canvas and with a picture of the finished, beautiful tapestry clear in our mind. That story is the one we want to tell. Our craft and our skill is to physically create something that resembles and reflects this vision as closely as possibly.

We choose the material, the colors and the pattern. We put our needle to the canvas and punch through, trying to keep to our original plan and pattern as closely as we can

But here we, as content creators and storytellers, start to differ from the traditional seamstress, even on an analogy-basis. The seamstress does not have a great big audience standing behind her, especially not an audience that have needles and tools of their own and look decidedly eager to have a go at our creation themselves.

This is where we need to develop a new skill – that of planning for audience engagement, how we would want them to interact, what we will do with said interaction. Do we want to make sure our new collaborators and co-creators follow our original plan for our creation, supporting it as closely as possible? Or are we comfortable with letting them choose on their own and follow their own visions. And are we in that case prepared to embrace this new creation with as much fervor as we did our original one?

What we need to do – as I’ve mentioned in earlier posts – is to be prepared to relinquish control. By letting the audience in on our creation it can become bigger and more beautiful than we could have imagined ourselves. It might even be some of our co-creators show up without needles or thread, preferring some other kinds of tools; spray paint, glue and mosaics, you name it. And if it enhances our creation – why not?

Then again we might want to keep some control over our creation. In that case we’d need to put aside a part of our canvas and direct our audience there, allowing them freedom within certain borders, while keeping it a part of the whole of the creation. This does carry the risk of trying to harness the creative power of the engaged audience – if they do engage, and if they do involve themselves creatively, the piece of canvas set aside for them might quickly start to feel too narrow. This could see us facing co-creators that have put up their own canvases and gone off in their own direction.

What we choose to do and how we choose to approach our craft is up to us. But what reach and what impact we can hope to achieve… that’s where we’d need to take our audience, our co-creators into account.