The ability to dance in different worlds and have industries converge seems to be a major theme of transmedia.
Independent filmmakers who work at Scribe, and who typically might do a lot of their filmmaking on their own, must now work with people who don’t know much about filmmaking and don’t have the traditional tools for creating a film readily available. They aren’t stepping on to a set where everyone knows the language of film.
In the Google Hangout the media producers expressed that they must learn to reach beyond what they already know. As we become more attuned to how to reach and excite an audience (and ourselves as creators) the sense that we are not just one type of media producer seems to loom large. Most people in the Hangout seem to have experienced this, though it seemed especially applicable to filmmaking. The filmmakers aren’t just making a feature length film. They now want to create something with which people are interacting. Do they need to do this though? In the spirit of trying to have not just users but participants or collaborators having an interactive piece helps. People who see a movie or a news piece about a social issue often want to know what they can do next. Yet, is every documentary about social change? Is every movie in need of something that exists outside the movie? While a transmedia ethic helps create a life beyond the singular experience of watching a film it could potentially bog down the production in excess information. There ends up being just more thing to run at the risk of losing what draws people to media to begin with: Story.
The moderator at the end of the Hangout expressed the point that if you do decide to go the route of creating media that aspires to be participatory you truly need to make it something that viewers or users can feel they collaborated on and not just consumed. It’s a desirable component of a lot of media that it was created with the help of everyone who is watching. This earns your production a certain credibility among people who might otherwise question the authorship of the piece, but as most people who create films or games know it is hard to give up authorship. This is seen in the experience of the facilitators at Scribe as well. They too had a hard time learning to collaborate when they were working with people who were new to filmmaking. It was easy for them to either take over a lot of the work or to act as a traditional teacher with a hierarchical model. Both the Scribe piece and the Google Hangout reveal that letting go of this role is key to a true collaboration.
As much as we would like to promote a culture of collaboration in theory, it is indeed hard to give up the idea of authorship — of owning the creative process that went into a work of art and taking personal pride in it. I guess we do have to also delve into human motivations behind creativity and what the act of creation really involves.
I think our instinct to want to take some individual credit for the fruit of our artistic labor is as valid a human impulse as our desire to promote a sense of community. It’s a little like wanting to have children, maybe a shot at achieving some immortality so that when it’s time to go, we wouldn’t feel like we were just some passing, insignificant jot in the bigger scheme of things.
As a process, creation is essentially a lonely job. For us in the field of writing, we are probably familiar with the feeling of sitting before a computer screen or a blank page and realizing that for the next few hours or so, it’s only gonna be us and the voices in our head who need to reach a consensus.
Authorship is often hard to give up, but collaboration is also necessary very often in media work. Is everyone you interview for a journalism story not also collaborating when it comes to the final work? Perhaps we authors pen the final result alone, weaving together interviews and information, but without the voices of the participants, it would probably be in the fiction category.
I know several music artists have gone with the idea of collaboration when it comes to making a music video, having fans send in videos of themselves mouthing the lyrics or doing a particular task set by the artist. Perhaps the idea is that more people will watch the end result if they’re eager to glance themselves in the final work, or if they feel as if they contributed.