Writer and director, Lance Weiler, will attend Sundance later this month. The 41-year-old DIY-guru has written, directed, and self-distributed two features, The Last Broadcast (1998) and Head Trauma (2006), founded The WorkBook Project, an online and traveling network for sharing creative solutions, and a production company, Seize the Media, which specializes in the emerging realm of transmedia.
I first dipped my toe in transmedia at a conference held at MIT in 2007. It’s a fascinating development for those of us who work in story-based structures (like advertising).
Here is Weiler’s take on transmedia:
It’s not just about being on multiple screens, it’s the idea that a story can have multiple timelines. It can have a linear structure in one sense, in one of the strands, but you can also go vertically down through those timelines and jump into another line. In some ways I feel that I’m a story architect. Or an experience designer. I want to create experiences that hopefully evoke some sense of feeling or response, and that’s no different from when I’m writing or directing films, television, or games. I’m storytelling agnostic. I don’t want to be tied to a potential format or a certain running time. I want to be able to tell the story in the way that I want to tell the story, that’s most reflective of what I’m trying to say.
Seize the Media describes transmedia as “an approach to story delivery that aggregates fragmented audiences by adapting productions to new modes of presentation and social integration.” Seize the Media also endeavors to describe transmedia in a graph: