Earlier this year, Latitude set out to understand audiences’ evolving expectations around their everyday content experiences—with TV shows, movies, books, plot-driven video games, news, and even advertising. We began by speaking with leaders in the emerging “transmedia” space to investigate the challenges and the opportunities that today’s storytellers are encountering.

Then we asked 158 early adopters from across the world how they’d like to experience stories in the future. During the course of a generative, online survey, participants were asked to play the role of producer; they chose a narrative (a book, movie, TV show, plot-driven video games, news story, etc.) that they know well and re-invented how audiences might experience that story. Some of the ideas participants suggested are possible today even if they don’t exist yet—while others require technologies that are still several years coming.

Illustrations by Latitude*, (cc) some rights reserved.
You can also view the illustrations on Flickr.

By analyzing our participants’ responses and the storytelling concepts they generated, we were able to uncover four elements—the “4 I’s”—that will continue to play a significant role in our experiences with narrative-based media. Immersion and interactivity primarily help an audience to go deeper into a story, while integration and impact are about bringing a story of out of the screen, into our actual lives.

Click here to view a larger version.
Infographic created by Latitude, (cc) some rights reserved.

Some key findings from the study include:

• Transmedia is more than media-shifting. Eighty-two percent of participants wanted more mobile apps that would complement, not just replicate, their TV viewing experiences.
• The real world is a platform, too. When asked to develop a new way of interacting with stories, 52% of participants treated the real world as another “platform,” incorporating networked real-world objects, augmented reality, 3D projected environments, and other technologies that bridge the divide between digital and physical.
• Audiences crave more control. Seventy-nine percent suggested interactions that would allow them to alter a storyline by influencing a character’s decisions or by becoming a character themselves.
• Traditional notions of authorship are changing. The real-time, connected culture of the Web is converting storytelling to a more participatory art; 93% of participants expressed interest in submitting possible story ideas to producers, and a whopping 2/3 said they’d be willing to help fund stories they’re interested in (e.g., on a platform like Kickstarter)

To explore more insights and opportunities, download the full study report for The Future of Storytelling: Phase 1.

We’re currently completing research on The Future of Storytelling: Phase 2, a large-scale international exploration focused on quantifying storytelling trends and opportunities, and understanding key audiences for multi-platform and transmedia experiences. Phase 2 will be published in Spring/Summer 2013. Sign up to be notified by e-mail when findings are available.

Study leads:
Kim Gaskins, Director of Content Development
Neela Sakaria, EVP/Managing Director

Supporting analysts:
Jessica Reinis, Senior Research Analyst
Victoria McComiskey, Research Analyst

*Illustrations by Gregory Hartman for Latitude.

Latitude is an international research consultancy helping clients create engaging content, software and technology that harness the possibilities of the Web. To learn more about working with Latitude, fill out this form or send an email to info@latd.com.

We realize this might be a difficult question to answer — story preferences can be complex, driven by the story’s genre, our mood, or other situational factors like who we happen to be with at the time. If you were inclined to answer, “it really depends…” above, leave us a comment and let us know a little more about your thoughts on the topic.

This week’s spotlight on Sean Hood:

Sean is a screenwriter, filmmaker, and instructor at The USC School of Cinematic Arts. He best known for horror films but more recently for action films. Sean has written screenplays for The Haunting in New York (Horror), Conan The Barbarian 3D (Fantasy), Rambo: Last Stand (Action) Blackwell (Thriller), and Subterranean (Sci-Fi). You can read his complete filmography on IMDb.

We’re glad to connect with you, Sean. We’ve been following some of your writing online, and we know you’re a very active thinker about the future of storytelling. Can you give us a little background on yourself and how you got into the “transmedia” space?

I’ve spent the last twelve years as a filmmaker. I went to the USC Graduate School of Cinematic Arts, and I’m teaching there now. Mostly, I write screenplays to make a living, but also direct my own films, and I blog about the future of storytelling and the craft of screenwriting at genrehacks.com.

Content that Sean created for the 2011 Conan the Barbarian movie bled out into a Web series, motion comics, graphic novels, a traditional novel, online multiplayer games, iPhone games—all of which told unique branches of the Conan story.

In the last five years especially, it’s become more and more difficult in Hollywood to get original projects off the ground. There’s a real focus on pre-branded content. So, I keep my eyes open for other ways to tell stories in emerging mediums. Movies are so expensive that I think many Hollywood filmmakers are looking for other, cheaper ways to tell stories—whether that be through webisodes, independent films, emerging mediums on multiple platforms, or transmedia. Transmedia in particular is becoming really attractive to storytellers, I think, because there really aren’t any rules for it yet; no one quite knows what they’re doing, and people are just sort of playing and goofing around with these new ideas and formats and seeing what happens. You don’t get to do that kind of experimentation in mainstream film or TV.

As a storyteller, why do you think transmedia holds so much appeal? Where do you see the most potential for it to change the ways stories are told?

Every time a new technology emerges, artists and storytellers tend to hi-jack and repurpose it for their own ends. Right now, there’s so many new kinds of media for communication: a YouTube video, a tweet, a Facebook comment, a blog article, a web chat, an iPhone game, a webisode, a motion comic, an eBook—any activity on the web suddenly prompts us to ask, “How can I use this tools all-together to serve a narrative?”

Yet with all these new tools, the fundamental nature of a story remains the same. For me, a story always contains two things. One: a story is about somebody for whom the audience has some empathy. Two: that somebody has some sort of problem—something they want something very badly but are having trouble getting, and they are fearful of what will happen if they fail. With those fundamental elements, you can use almost any tool to create a world around those characters or around that situation and build out from there.

What’s also appealing thing about transmedia—and one of the reasons I got into film to begin with—is that it’s highly collaborative. Transmedia offers opportunities to collaborate not only with other artists and storytellers, but directly with the audience. Otherwise, I get lonely sitting by myself in my office with my dog.

Going back to what you said earlier about Hollywood favoring pre-branded content and franchises due to cost issues—it sounds like you’re implying that transmedia is an attractive option cost-wise from a creator’s standpoint, offering a place to really experiment freely?

That’s absolutely true. For me, transmedia is about brand creation rather than brand recycling. I mean, the only movies I’ve written that actually get made have been sequels, remakes, or adaptations—and I’m not complaining. It’s lucrative, and it’s a lot of fun. But we screenwriters, filmmakers and storytellers got into the craft because we thought we had our own stories to tell. In transmedia, there’s an opportunity to start really small. Your project may eventually have seven branches in different mediums, but you start the project off on just one of those little arms to see how it takes off. Then, it can branch to another medium as it gets more and more popular and complex. If you are lucky, you get to a point where some of the more expensive mediums like a movie or a TV show become viable because you’ve pre-tested the concept and built an audience.

One of the things we’ve definitely been hearing and thinking about is: is it best to conceive of a project as “transmedia” from the outset, or can you decide to go that direction later?

You have to envision a transmedia project right from the beginning. If you think of it as just telling one story in one medium and then replicating it on a bunch of others, it’s not transmedia. You have to imagine how the world of your story and how the problem of your characters can branch out—you have to think about how different elements of the story can be told in different mediums, and why these branching mediums are necessary. The whole should be greater than the sum of its parts, and that takes vision from the outset.

That said, transmedia is not about pre-planning every single little piece as it extends in all these different mediums and different platforms. It’s more like crafting a little piece of DNA; you know it’s going to grow up into something really big, and you can imagine its potential in all these different realms. But once it starts growing and lots of other people get involved, you are more like a farmer growing a crop—you seed it, water it, feed it and nurture it, but you can’t completely control it, or even be entirely sure of what it will grow into. A transmedia project doesn’t just burst from your head, fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’ skull. A transmedia storyteller comes up with ideas and potentials and then works with a multiplicity of collaborators, including the audience, as it grows. It takes on a life of its own.

So why all the excitement about transmedia now? And is it really something new?

I think it’s because of the Internet. Even before the Web, there was always the possibility of a popular movie inspiring a line of original comic books or an original line of novels or toys. However, it was always a top-down process. Now everyone can sit in front of the computer and access all these different kinds of media. Anyone can be a writer, a filmmaker, a designer, or a visual artist, and put their work in front of an audience. The Internet has made us all active storytellers. This creates a different kind of opportunity for career storytellers because, not only they can put all their stuff online, they can interact directly with their audience through their phones and their iPads and their computers. They can co-create. It’s a massively new feedback loop.

Furthermore, storytelling always has to reflect the lives and the consciousness of the people of its age. We’re at the point now where everyone’s consciousness is constantly being expanded, taxed, overwhelmed, and sometimes even enlightened by all these different communication mediums that we have at our fingertips. So, the stories we tell have to reflect that, and utilize these very mediums that have so deeply affected, expanded and fragmented the human experience. There is no better way to do that than with a transmedia project.

One of the most striking things for me is the role of mobile and what it enables; there’s this expectation among consumers and audiences that they can bring the story or content to a level of personal relevance that they couldn’t before. In other words, it’s not just about me going deeper and deeper into the storyworld and finding out more about a character or a storyline. In some cases, it’s also about opportunities to bring the story out into my world.

Yes, exactly. In other words, stories used to be told in such a way that either you were alone in a room with a book or you were in a dark theater watching a screen or in a living room in front of a TV set. It was sort of locked down, but now it can come out into the world. It’s going to be really interesting. Of course, there are all sorts of gimmicks and games now—from flash mobs to planking to geo-caching, but, beyond that, I think there is an opportunity for storytelling to truly leak out into the real world, not only in the sense that you’re taking it with you everywhere on your phone, but that part of the story itself is experienced in public, physical locations.

I mean, when followers of the The Dark Knight transmedia campaign were going to bakeries and finding cell phones from the Joker hidden in cakes, the “medium” of the story became the real world.

From your perspective, what makes the difference between novelty or gimmicks, as you say, and really meaningful, good experiences?

The difference is that all the platforms, gimmicks and surprises that the storyteller uses in a transmedia way has to come from the characters—whatever problems, needs, hopes, schemes or dreams the characters have. The audience should feel that they’re moving from one medium to the other because the flow of the story and the goals of the characters call for it, because the story couldn’t be told in any other way.

Then, not only does the audience accept it, but they become that much more engaged because it’s reflective of the way we actually live. We live life in transmedia; we read a kindle while watching TV and are interrupted by a text. We talk on the phone while driving a car and are distracted by a video billboard. We tweet our location, share what we see, and comment on what others are doing hundreds of miles away, all in real time. So, it makes sense that fictional characters would be expressing themselves in this fragmented way, and that a story would unfold on multiple sites.

For me, the key is to think: “What are the needs of my characters, how would they express those needs and pursue their goals in today’s world, and how can that be expressed through transmedia?”

Transmedia, when it works, is not about plot. There are multiple plots all co-created and supported by the mob. Transmedia, at its best, is about the characters.

Yes, exactly. So, to what extent should the audience have input into how the story plays out?

I think it really depends on the particular project. What’s key is that the interactivity has to spring from the desire and engagement of the people involved. Otherwise, it can be very disruptive to the experience. The joy of listening to a story around a campfire comes from having empathy for the characters—really feeling the joys, terrors, and heartaches of that character—and also believing in the character’s world. Too often a clumsy interactive device—a simple, choose-your-own-adventure, for example—can disrupt that magical dreamstate. When I’m suddenly making a choice for my character, I’m not feeling for the character; I’m made aware that, “Oh. This isn’t a real person. This world is fake.”

So, the interactivity should be based on the audience believing, or suspending disbelief, that the characters and story are real and, specifically, that their own actions in the story have an effect on the emotional lives of the characters and the choices they are making—not that they’re making choices for the characters, but their input changes the quality of the fictional world. Then that world and the people in it become more and more real. Then the audience becomes a character interacting inside this world. Then, there’s the opportunity to become even more empathetically connected to the characters moving around the multiple mediums. The characters feel more like real people, and we feel for them more.

So, with interactivity, there’s an opportunity there to enhance storytelling, by increasing engagement and empathy, and there is an opportunity to blow it, depending on whether things are executed skillfully or clumsily.

As you said, at the fundamental core of any story is the notion of relating to or empathizing with a character. That hasn’t changed over time, but what is changing about the mechanics of storytelling, or the way we capture and unfold stories?

There is a major change that I think we’re on the brink of—closer than many people think—in the world of video games. Right now, video games are very immersive and cinematic in the way we can move through space and shoot at things, fight, manipulate objects, and so on. That kind of physical interaction with a finely detailed environment is very sophisticated. But the big change happens when the user becomes emotionally involved in the unfolding action the way they do in a novel, a play or a movie.

I talked earlier about the idea of empathy. We can empathize with characters represented as simply as a scribbled cartoon—take Charlie Brown, for example. That’s because human beings can project an inner life onto almost anything: a doll, a pet, almost any object or animal. We can imagine, “what is that creature feeling?”

So, as soon as the characters in a game or some sort of interactive environment seem to have an inner life and authentic emotional reactions to the things we, the game player, do within that game, that’s going to trigger our empathy, and get us wondering, “What is that character thinking? What is that character’s intention? Is she sad? Is she happy? What is she thinking?” Suddenly, you’re not just shooting zombies. You’re not just beating up bad guys. Now you’re imagining how this pixelated figure might be feeling and what she might be motivated by, and you are becoming more and more engaged in the relationship you are forming with this character.

What do you think is the best way to get people to connect in that deeper, emotional way? Will we need more advanced technology, or is it just about conveying some other element of the narrative differently?

We don’t need hard AI driving this kind of interaction; we just need enough of those triggers in the game character we interact with to make us project onto that image the idea of an inner life. Remember, we are capable of projecting an “inner life” onto a stuffed animal, a cartoon character, or a marionette. We just need the right triggers.

Filmmakers have become adept at creating these triggers. In a famous experiment, a shot of an actor with a blank expression was inter-cut in three ways; it was intercut with a beautiful woman, with a banquet table, and with a coffin. These three different montages were then shown to three different audiences, and the audiences were asked what the character—the man with the blank expression—was thinking. Each audience read his expression differently. One said, “Oh, that man is so in love.” Another said, “Oh, that man is so hungry.” The third said, “Oh, that man is so sad.” It’s the same completely blank expression, but we project an inner life upon it.

As of now, most of the interactive environments available haven’t really been able to access that capacity of the audience to believe in the inner life of the characters. But, when the people who design games move away from the rendering of the physical space, and into the development of characters and behaviors, then you can hit a tipping point; people are going to have entirely different experiences inside this virtual world because they’ll be interacting emotionally and empathically with the characters rather than just moving around in space and shooting them.

That brings up a really interesting question: is it possible that the more immersive visuals we’ve been able to create for video games have reduced the effort we put into thinking about them, and actually diminished our ability to project an inner life onto characters?

Often, if you look at a character in a game, it looks really close to being human but there’s something that feels creepy about it—like a wax figure or an automaton. In robotics, they call it the “uncanny valley.” We may find that, in the near future, a much more simplified graphic character that nonetheless behaves as though it has an inner, emotional life, will be far, far more involving and engaging. Some movies—like Beowulf and The Polar Express—have animated characters that look almost human but not quite, and to me they are creepy and off-putting. That emphatic connection is completely broken. I’m more likely to believe Bugs Bunny is real. So, we may find that backing off on the photorealism actually helps to cultivate empathy.

Screenshot from The Polar Express

That kind of counterintuitive response is very interesting. Switching gears a bit, do you have any suggestions for other storytellers who are interested in or working in the transmedia space?

I’d say that no one really knows exactly what “transmedia” is yet. So, if you’re a storyteller, there is no reason you shouldn’t be telling stories and playing around with whatever you can get your hands on. We’re at a time now where digital cameras, editing software, online publishing tools, and so on, are literally free—or close to it. I think it’s too often that people who write screenplays or books wait around for somebody to give them permission to publish, to produce, or to share that work with the world. There’re thousands of tools that can help a storyteller create content and reach an audience. Maybe you only get a hundred people to look at your work at first—but that’s a lot of people. To be a storyteller, you don’t have Charlie Kaufman or Steven Spielberg; you just have embrace the tools available all around you and be inventive.

Click here to watch Melancholy Baby, a short film that represents a more personal aspect of Sean’s filmmaking. It was created, developed and distributed to an online audience.

This interview was conducted by Neela Sakaria, SVP at Latitude.

Latitude is an international research consultancy helping clients create engaging content, software and technology that harness the possibilities of the Web. To learn more about working with Latitude, fill out this form or contact Ian Schulte (ischulte@latd.com).

Study Background

Latitude has been at work on a new, multi-phase innovation study, The Future of Storytelling. We’re aiming to uncover the questions, challenges, and aspirations of tomorrow’s storytellers, and identify how they can better align with audiences’ changing expectations. (You can read more about the study’s goals here.)

So far, we’ve spoken with a number of experts and innovators in the emerging “transmedia” space to understand what kinds of challenges leading-edge content creators are facing, and what the “next big thing” might be, as seen from their perspective.

Now Seeking Forward-Thinking Participants

Now, we turn to you: we’d love for you to tell us what kinds of stories are resonating with you now—and, more importantly, what kinds of storytelling experiences you’d like to be having in the future. (Do you follow your favorite TV character on Twitter? Watch webisodes with bonus content? Ever wish you could influence the course of events in a story? How about have a dynamic conversation with one of the characters about whatever’s on your mind? Or maybe … )

We’ve devised a survey (which takes approximately 15 minutes to complete) with basic questions about how you experience media in various contexts and a couple of open-ended questions where we invite you to get creative about possible futures for storytelling. We’re offering $50 Amazon cards to 20 individuals with the best responses.*

Click here to go to the survey.

*The 20 best responses are determined by Latitude’s team upon closing of the survey, and should be considered final/non-negotiable. Rewards will be issued within 4 weeks’ time. Please take the survey only once—additional data from the same participant will be discarded and considered not eligible for reward.

Privacy and information-use note: more information about privacy and attribution are available at the very beginning of the survey. Latitude respects the privacy of its participants. Unless you choose to be personally attributed when prompted in the survey (in the event we wish to publish your input openly), we will never publish your responses in a personally identifiable way. If you do not wish to be personally attributed, we reserve the right to publish your input but not in a personally identifiable way (e.g. “Female, 29, New York, NY”). Latitude will never sell your information or make it available to third parties. “The Future of Storytelling” is a self-sponsored, non-client study designed, run, and published by Latitude.

Got questions? Contact: life-connected@latd.com

This week’s spotlight on Xavier Waterkeyn:

Xavier Waterkeyn is a literary agent and best-selling author. In just five years, his books have sold over 1.5 million copies. He has worked, in no particular order, as a director, interviewer, adult educator, tour guide, actor, manager of a psychic centre, graphic designer, photographer, marketer, bookseller and editor. Despite his many careers, Xavier likes to think of himself simply as a storyteller. And perhaps a bit of a know-it-all.

It’s great to speak with you, Xavier. We know you’ve been quite busy working with your partner, author Nathan Farrugia, on The Chimera Vector—a transmedia project that involves a lot of different components: an eBook, an audiobook, a graphic novel, and an app down the line. Can you tell us a little about your experience creating and overseeing the production of all these different pieces?

The Chimera Vector is primarily a technothriller novel. It takes you into a world of conspiracy where various people in various organizations are striving to accumulate power—creating chaos and mayhem—and it’s all about secret operatives and what they’re trying to do to stop all of that. So, we’ve got a core text that appeals to people ages 18-30 generally, and we’re looking at the kind of media this target market engages with: social media as well as the traditional media of book, film, and so on. The Chimera Vector novel is being simultaneously adapted as an eBook, as well as being sold print-on-demand.

Who do you see as the primary audience for transmedia, and how do you think transmedia can fulfill varied audience needs and preferences?

It’s now hopelessly outdated to think of people simply as “readers” or “viewers” or “audience members”—since, at any one point, any number of different texts in different media will appeal to all of them. And there are different personality types as well, and people who have different sense modality prejudices; there are the visual people who want to see stories; there are the audio people who want to hear stories; there are the readers who want to read stories.

There’s also a range between the totally passive to the actively engaged super-fan. So, people who just want to look at something, read it, watch it, listen to it, go away—and then there are people who immerse themselves in a world and become contributors and co-creators to that world.

A transmedia experience should ideally encompass all of those different worlds. That’s what happens when you do transmedia properly. So, what you need to do then is use the technology that you have available to the best of your ability to engage an audience member in that process.

Do you approach transmedia by thinking everything through from the get-go, and or is there a sizable element of improvisation—which could mean flexibility with regard to bringing in a new platform, or letting the audience influence the storyline, and so on?

I believe that you cannot sit down and second-guess the creative process. And as creators, we have to leave ourselves open to the possibility of things happening during a co-creative process that we might not have thought about originally during any planning stage. However, our process from the very beginning is to think of as many possible points of engagement and as many different media and forms of communication because, ultimately, we’re talking about the communicative act in the entertainment industry; we’re talking about bringing somebody into our world. It doesn’t matter if it’s an MTV video equipped for a pop song or a video game that’s taken five years to develop—creators think from the very beginning, “if we’re going to do a game called ‘Myst,’ let’s think of what a novelized version of that would look like and read like.”

Image from The Chimera Vector graphic novel

A certain amount of audience participation—and, in many cases, co-creation—seems essential for transmedia. How do you get people engaged, and strike the right participatory balance so that people are motivated, but not feeling like they have to work too hard?

If the core text is engaging, then a fandom will arise spontaneously. Now, we’re not saying, “let’s control fandom,” but instead “let’s factor that in from the very beginning and let’s make it easy for fans to engage in the process.” In short: the one thing fans want is engagement, and the one thing that we have to do as creators is make that engagement as easy as possible for them. For creative reasons? Who knows. Some of the best fans do become creators, and that’s okay.

So, to get people engaged from the start, we’re saying, “why don’t you come in and join with us in the creation of the world? We’re starting you off with this novel and with this world and with these characters and their concerns—but we’re inviting your active participation.” We might listen to suggestions about plot events and write that scene into the next book. Or we might think how a fan’s suggestion could inspire an entirely new plot line.

What are some of the pitfalls or mistakes you’ve seen?

Marketing-wise, I think that people don’t think as globally as possible. I don’t believe they cross-promote enough. Take Heroes, for example. Did you know they created a graphic novel for the series? I didn’t, until I specifically started researching the space. So, there’s a graphic novel out there; somebody has gone to the trouble of drawing it, creating it, designing it, publishing it and you don’t know that it exists—but you know about the television series.

It would be so easy to product-place the graphic novel within the series. The problem is that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. That’s the core marketing mistake: you’ve got a whole bunch of people doing different things, and they didn’t think about their strategy holistically. It’s the absence of holistic thinking that’s bringing people down, not only for creative reasons but also strictly for marketing and economic reasons.

As somebody who’s creating in this space, is there anything that you wish you knew about people’s mindsets as they’re having these experiences? Or is it more about creating and seeing how people react to the world you’ve built?

I think it’s both. Personally, our initial approach has been “build it and they will come.” But, in terms of research, the sort of things that I would like to know would be “who are the people that are into this?” More than that, what turns them on?—and not just the text, but what style of engagement works for them? People have sub-languages; for example, Twitter and Facebook are creating their own languages. Relatedly, I’d want to know: “how do you use social media without sounding as if you’re doing a sales pitch?” That’s really important.

What we really want to know is, how we can talk to you without talking at you or down to you? How do we invite you into this process and make it as inviting as possible? How do we communicate how fun it could be? That’s the challenging part.

This interview was conducted by Neela Sakaria, SVP at Latitude.

Latitude is an international research consultancy helping clients create engaging content, software and technology that harness the possibilities of the Web. To learn more about working with Latitude, fill out this form or contact Ian Schulte (ischulte@latd.com).