Malmö Arena Talk

Tired of answering “Why Transmedia”? Next time, reply (with pathos and swooshing hands):

I’m not a Jedi because I like the hum of the lightsaber in my hand…
and I’m not a Jedi because I like being a Jedi.
I’m a Jedi because the Galaxy needs a Jedi.

I’m in the business of liberating stories.

This means I help producers set stories free from old formats and business models and help them find users and financiers in new ways.

Since I work mostly with film, games and web, this is currently called “transmedia”, but really, this process stems from all creative and adaptation work. Making a film from a book, you need to re-connect to the core of the story, re-inventing how the story can be told in a new format. The only difference from the “book to film”-example is that today, the new storytelling possibilities and demands are connected to the potential of users, not the potential of formats.

The work of architects may provide an interesting paralell here: Often in charge of communicating a larger idea while creating an experiences and spaces for users to explore. Not so far from gameplay when you think of it.

Uploading images to my sadly ignored Flickr-account this weekend, I found pictures from Berlin and Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish museum (1999) that I passed on my way to a conference networking event last fall.

Documenting this angular and cold building, I wondered about the story it wanted to tell. Later that evening, a conference colleague told me that evidently, there are no straight angles in the building, even floors slant, giving the experience of distortion.

Though I can’t find any references to this interpretation in the Wikipedia article above, I find it an interesting take on a museum representing the Jewish view on Germany, and of course the history of the Holocaust. Attempting to let us embody a tiny part of the estrangement and horror is a way of telling the most important story the museum has to tell.

In 2006, also in Berlin, in a similar fashion, I passed Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial (2005), a site designed to “produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere [..] the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason”. Quite a similar attempt, then, and again playing with distortion of level (all the blocks of the square are different heights) together with a scary, massive impression of conformity with blocks from similar casts.

Passing the monument (not knowing what it was until I went home and googled it), I was struck by the repetition and massive impact of the work, but staying on the outside, I mistook it for a strange park. A warm day in July at lunch-time, people were spread out on the blocks – some are in a convenient height for casual leaning – lying down reading, some sharing lunch, some in a hurry, criss-crossing through the square, navigating the blocks.

At home, having learned what the monument was, it made a big impression on me. Such genious, I thought, to design something so un-exeptional, something so integrated in the city that it becomes a part of people’s everyday lives, so common that it becomes un-noticable, un-questioned amongst us. Such horror.

This is the effect of historical events, is it not, shifting perspectives and making it impossible to look at the familiar with the same eyes again.

Lesson: The strongest stories have a powerful emotional core while still allowing for personal associations and re-creations.

When producers are afraid to loose control of their stories by giving control to the audience I try to assure them of this: The stronger your story and your core belief is, the less scary it will be to give away control. People want to be part of your story, not just any story.

Find the emotional core of your story and you can set it free.