At Bellyfeel we are currently writing a new native transmedia drama that is character driven. In the story as we have it so far the audience spends most of its time with a single character – the hero. From his lowly position in the fictional society he listens and comments on the events that happen to him and around him.

Awareness

The genre is sci-fi/future noir and a pretty detailed and logical storyworld, including historical timeline of events and backstory, has been written.

It was during the creation of the storyworld material that we considered character points of view (POV) in terms of knowledge and awareness of the world they live in, and how we could engage the audience through our hero’s solitary and limited POV.

Most of our complex storyworld is unknown to the hero so we decided to outline it as a separate but organically linked narrative through archive news stories, diaries etc. This will give the audience an understanding of the hero’s world, one that is possibly even greater than his own. It will also create a form of engagement through tension as the audience may know before the hero does whether he’s taking the right course of action or not.

So far, so traditional storytelling.

The Spread

We are now looking at the means of delivering the fragmented narratives and how to deploy, or spread them wisely. The audience spends the majority of its story time with our hero via social media. Here it discovers what he discovers and, more importantly, how it affects him. Through material on a website or email or through an app, the audience explore the storyworld in which the hero lives.

The Big Edit

This phase of transmedia storytelling is crucial to how this form of narrative drama works; it’s about the all-important juxtaposition of the fragmented elements of the hero’s story and the world’s story and how and when we make them available to the audience.

We can call this phase ‘The Big Edit’ or ‘The Big Schedule’. It is one of the most exciting parts of the process and is so very different to traditional ‘fixed’ or ‘locked-off’ delivery because ‘The Big Edit’ is done live and on a day-to-day basis. This means we can tweak or even re-write material if necessary to include audience reaction, likes, dislikes and even fan fiction where appropriate.

[note color=”ffffd6″]At Bellyfeel we believe story remains the same. It’s the way we tell the story that is changing.[/note]

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