Innovative storytelling concepts are tried and tested across local and international markets in both the public and private sectors. Public service broadcasters distribute content both online and through their traditional media channels. In Ireland, this output is guided by a public service broadcasting charter, a statement of principles and accountability. RTE’s chief digital officer Múirne Laffan says that ‘people are looking for thematic discoverability, not randomly browsing’. The ability to track users helps to build a relationship and offers a ‘tailored discovery’. Data is gathered on individual users to create an incomplete personalisation, to offer ‘a more tailored consumer experience. Stories you may or may not like … we think you should hear them’ (Laffan, interview 2016). Commercialisation is not always the primary objective as key players seek to develop content that is recognised as being ground-breaking and new. Technological considerations and complexities may act as a barrier to entry, even for experienced professionals who may not have the specialised knowledge or expertise to exploit new storytelling platforms. Somehow, technological know-how must be combined with storytelling skills to create new products that build audiences to achieve a commercial return. Internet TV providers increase audience share by regularly revising and updating their programmes. New product gives the audience a reason to come back. Some early online broadcast sites had limited success offering scheduled episodic content. In the late 1990s, The Spot lacked the necessary funds to purchase bandwidth for their daily online broadcast. Without access to an adequate audience reach, the webcast was unable to generate sufficient advertising revenue. Without the advertising income, the money was not available to purchase greater bandwidth. Many niche online broadcast sites offer quirky or off-centre content. This content may initially attract a limited audience but it is possible for them to gradually secure a significant proportion of the mass market. Providers offering repurposed content have been particularly successful in building large audiences over the short term. In 2014 British Pathé released its newly digitised archive of content. 85,000 historical and cultural films dating from 1895 to 1976. This represents a fundamental shift in online broadcasting: historical content offered online at a time when traditional broadcasters are being accused of reducing production budgets to the detriment of programme quality. British Pathé has recycled quality material in order to build a market share and achieve revenue without production costs. The rapidly changing media sphere creates new opportunities while promoting career obsolescence. This chapter considers several transmedia campaigns, the rise of in-house content creation departments in multinational corporations, transmedia news content, and the development of VR products that are seeking to build a new film language. With this in mind and to promote the development of VR products, the Palo Alto company Jaunt has launched a filming guide titled The Cinematic VR Field Guide: Best Practices for Shooting in 360°. The company describes this guide as a ‘living document’ which they intend to update as VR film-making trends change. Jaunt are asking the VR community to send them their tips and tricks which they can share through this publication.

#FINDTHEGIRL

BBC Three’s #FindTheGirl campaign was a transmedia project to promote the five-episode online drama Thirteen (2016), the story of ‘a young woman who escapes after thirteen years of being held captive by a kidnapper’ (Puschmann, 2016). By following the fictional journalist Sarah Hays on Twitter and YouTube, viewers could participate in an interactive detective story, carrying out online research (websites and social media accounts) on behalf of Sarah, to help to track down another missing child and the man who might be responsible for her abduction. Over several weeks, Sarah communicated with users via Twitter, responding to their theories and hunches. The transmedia campaign ran concurrently with the series, to promote audience engagement and retention. There were #FindTheGirl clues included in the Thirteen series, picked up by online users, who encouraged Sarah to follow up on their leads and investigate further.

BLAST THEORY: IVY4EVR

The Brighton-based artist group ‘Blast Theory’ creates performance-based interactive art that explores social and political themes. Channel 4 Education commissioned the company to design an interactive SMS drama called Ivy4EVR (2010). Delivered directly to individual users via their mobile phone, the project was intended to create a personalised and private space for young people, to allow them to explore issues that affect their day-to-day lives. These issues included drug use, alcohol and sexual behaviour. Written by Tony White, Ivy4EVR featured a character called Ivy, a 17-year-old girl who takes drugs, might be pregnant and whose story arc depended on individual audience responses to her text messages. While the themes under discussion were delicate and sensitive, not all her texts were controversial. Conversations with Ivy could even be relatively straightforward. The story world of Ivy4EVR used a simple language parser to look for ‘tags’ that it could respond to. This enabled Ivy to give appropriate replies to texts sent to her. The naturalistic responses that were created resulted in audiences building a strong connection with the fictional character. Developer Nick Tandavanitj notes that Ivy4EVR exploited the fact that its audience had mobile connectivity all the time, providing a staccato yet long-term engagement (Tandavanitj, interview 2016).

KAREN

Blast Theory’s mobile app Karen (2015) was created with the National Theatre of Wales (a theatre with no venues) to develop a performance art piece that would work for an online audience. ‘Karen’ (played by actress Claire Cage) is a life-coach who communicates with you via smartphone, contacting you at all times of the day (and night). You become a character in Karen’s world through a series of context-based conversations where ‘night is night’. Her character asks you questions about yourself and your relationships, modulating your responses to her questions, rather than driving major plot changes. Karen can be viewed as a parable on oversharing, or the tale of a life-coach with serious ‘issues’. The story went through 44 iterations of tone and structure, the team initially shot 19 scenes, then reshot 12. The app was developed in collaboration with Dr. Kelly Page who provided medical advice on psychometric profiling and helped to create a data plan to organise and make use of 30–40 psychometric scales. Karen is in fact profiling you. Data collected and collated during your time interacting with her is packaged into a downloadable report which you can access on completion of the story. This project considers the ethical issues around data gathering, the seamless interfaces used by corporations to track your responses and create a profile of your online activities and social media presence. Tandavanitj describes Karen as ‘the most out-of-the-box project, drawn from theatre, unfolding now, in real-time’ (Tandavanitj, interview 2016).

CONTENT CREATION DEPARTMENTS: GOING VIRAL

Companies are increasingly producing branded content in-house and online; video content dominates. ‘M-Live’ is the global content studio of Marriott, the multinational hospitality company based in Bethesda, Maryland. M-Live looks for experiential marketing opportunities for Marriott’s 19 hotel brands. The studio creates content for distribution across multiple social media platforms to engage customers, build trust and promote lifetime loyalty to the Marriott name. The team ‘tracks pop culture events across various verticals’ to look for marketing opportunities globally (Lazauskas, 2015). In 2015, a $1million reward was offered by an anonymous donor following the theft (10 years previously) of a pair of the famous ruby slippers from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. M-Live added 1million Marriott Reward points to the purse, then quickly developed associated creative content and ran a very successful campaign of targeted social media posts and Times Square ads to promote their offer. The company has partnered with content creators to produce story-driven short films, one shot in a Marriott hotel, with no product placement. Marriott has created a media company, where the emphasis is on telling stories to promote audience engagement and build brand loyalty, not direct selling. It does not use many established social media marketing methods such as the brand-damaging ‘pseudo-notifications’ or ‘dark patterns’, which effectively trick visitors into meaningless and unrewarding engagement with a site (Wilshere, 2017).

Global strategic consulting firm Accenture have opened a 10,000 sq ft content studio in New York. Accenture Interactive and Deloitte Digital offer ‘vertical experts, global consumer insight, the manpower to produce thousands of pieces of content, and – because of their existing consulting relationships – a better understanding of how digital marketing can fit into an overall business strategy’ (Wegert, 2016). The LastMinute.com group network of travel brands reaches over 40 countries. In 2016 they created a content development lab in Europe to ‘enhance curated, editorial content for its rich and young audiences on its sites and social media pages’ (Mortimer, 2016). In 2013, MTV Networks and Sony created their ‘next-generation studio’ Astronauts Wanted. Their transmedia title Midsømmer is ‘a gender-bending take on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, fed to consumers in non-linear bits and pieces across multiple media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and Vine’ (Lev-Ram, 2016). Astronauts Wanted have taken an experimental approach to transmedia development, bringing together a group of talented youth, some of whom already have a significant following on social media. The collective, called Flight Club, are encouraged to innovate and create, exploring new possibilities for online story development and distribution and with the eventual aim of monetising their work.

The film-makers behind the independent sci-fi film The Phoenix Incident (2016) ‘have been cultivating a viral campaign over the past two years on hidden websites, Twitter feeds and Facebook’ (Snider, 2016). Part of the film’s budget was used to build visual partnerships with online outlets including Shazam. Story elements were scattered throughout the internet on various platforms and distribution channels to create an ‘event-based film with an immersive interactive viral campaign’, turning a traditional cinematic product into an ‘experience’ (Snider, 2016).

Companies such as ViralHog seek exclusive deals to license video content from around the world. These clips are then sold on to news organisations and the revenue is shared with the content creators (Judah, 2016). Jukin Media ‘represents’ potentially viral content which it has found in social media outlets and licenses these ‘clips to TV, advertising and digital publishing’ (Judah, 2016). While much of the content is ‘benign’, the company has also sourced controversial footage including scenes from the Shoreham air crash in England. The BBC says it will only pay for footage ‘if there is a strong editorial justification for doing so’ (Judah, 2016). The monetisation of video clips raises important questions with regard to journalistic ethics. Footage finds its way onto multiple online outlets (both legally and pirated) so quickly that it is unlikely to have been subjected to journalistic rigour. When stories are found to be false or fabricated, they are simply deleted, something traditional print news sources were unable to do.

THE DIGITAL NEWSROOM: TRANSMEDIA AND VR

Forbes publishing platform Brand Voice has around 2000 global contributors. The business magazine has moved from a fixed-rate model to a contributor model (paying for traffic) for its journalists (Goodfellow, 2016). This has resulted in a significant rise in traffic for Forbes. Yet the model has been criticised for allowing advertisers direct access to Forbes CMS, which could compromise the company’s journalistic integrity. Forbes’ director Paul Mikhailoff counters this by saying that in the digital world, journalists no longer have the sole right ‘to inform’. He describes the ‘purpose of branded content as value exchange’ (Mikhailoff quoted in Goodfellow, 2016) which is not just focused on securing a purchase. Brands are increasingly setting up newsrooms to offer a user experience made up of both advertising and branded content.

Unilever’s new in-house content studios are a response to the increasing use of ad-blocking software (which prevent brands reaching their intended market) and audiences’ move towards curated content and their desire to seek out brand experiences (Joseph, 2016). U-Studio will create ‘how-to videos, infographics, articles, product information’, while U-Entertainment will drive the development of ‘TV series, web series, games, music integration’ (Joseph, 2016). The Financial Times has a digital subscriber base and does not fully depend on advertising revenues. It is now creating high-quality long-form video pieces through its film studio in London. The newspaper’s competitive advantage is its ‘exceptional insights into its audience’s interests and reading patterns’ (Burrell, 2016). It is distributing news through social media platforms, offering ‘one-click-free’ high-value content to new customers, with a view to converting them to paid subscribers. The Lantern Dashboard system in the FT newsroom gives ‘every FT journalist access to detailed analytics on who is reading their stories’ (Burrell, 2016).

The New York Times has ambitious plans for the newsroom including major investments in visual journalism. With less than half its readers living in New York, the paper must produce content that is both relevant and coherent to an international audience, while still abiding by its original mission statement of accuracy and integrity. Scene-setting video plays automatically when you load a page. Interactive story pages include parallax scrolling, ‘a computer graphic effect that makes the background of a webpage load at a different time than the foreground, creating an immersive experience’ (Koc, 2015). Rollovers and data visualisations allow readers to access further information and to interact with the data, avoiding clutter and confusing graphical layouts. All video, animation and photographic content are high quality. The paper is restructuring its newsroom to make possible ‘smaller, more focused coverage clusters that operate apart from big desks’ (Mullin, 2016). In a memo to staff outlining the steps toward digital audiovisual content, Dean Baquet stated that editors ‘will not worry about filling space. They will worry over coverage, and the best ways to tell stories’ (Baquet quoted in Mullin, 2016). In 2015 the paper debuted its immersive virtual-reality experience The Displaced and delivered Google Cardboard sets to its subscribers. The ten-minute film follows three children in Ukraine, South Sudan and Lebanon; ‘you hear their stories while walking alongside them in fields, sitting with them in rubble, and witnessing the frantic scramble to receive food dropped from aid planes’ (Welsh, 2015). Describing the impact of VR, video journalist Ben Solomon states that it is experientially closer to theatre than film. As in theatre, his VR film uses light and sound to target your attention at a particular subject, to make you ‘look’ (Welsh, 2015).

STORYTELLING ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

Story Time Twitter is a series of extended narratives created out of a succession of tweets. These live ‘performances’ can last an hour or so, and the ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’ from a ‘rapt’ and often ‘raucous’ crowd only enhances the shared in-the-moment experience. The audience can read the story as an archive in the writer’s account, or participate ‘live’, to be entertained as ‘the author painstakingly tries to contort a long story into some indeterminate number of 140-character chunks’ (Pierce, 2016).

Rob Wittig and Mark Marino have produced several ‘netprov’ projects that incorporate ‘integrated elements of contributory collaboration, social media discourse and online hoax in developing performance fictions’. In their year-long netprov Occupy MLA (2012), a story was presented through the Twitter accounts of several members of a fictional academic faculty (Koenitz et al, 2015 p. 31).

Instagram Stories allows users to produce a ‘daily story that strings together photos and video’ (McAlone, 2016). YouTube stars, whose primary income was previously from Google Ads, are now achieving significant revenue through sponsored, branded content on Instagram. While user engagement is greatest on these platforms, Facebook still offers an extraordinary potential reach. The platforms are ‘major distribution points for these stars’ (McAlone, 2016). Creative ideas are developed as ‘short-form, half-hour, and feature-length’ (McAlone, 2016) packages to be pitched to multiple social media outlets. In this way, they hope to increase their fan-base and ultimately ‘branch out’ to more far-reaching distributors such as YouTube Red, Netflix and MTV.

Many television shows have successfully exploited their social media following to maintain currency and to increase their audience base. BBC America took to Tumblr, Twitter and Vine to promote Doctor Who (Nededog, 2015). Empire (2015) has a significant Twitter user-base who actively post tweets during the show (Moylan, 2015). These social media sites are the ‘word of mouth’ platforms for live audiences to dynamically engage with other viewers and the creators of the show.

DATA ANALYTICS

Data analytics tools like the ‘Contently Analytics dashboard’ allow stories to be tagged with attributes such as ‘topic’ and ‘format’. A story’s performance can be assessed by comparing its audience engagement metrics with similar data about other geostories (Lazauskas, 2016). Content research tool Buzzsumo identifies the most shared content and the key topic ‘influencers’ on social media platforms. Content producers use this data to guide their selection of subject choices when they are considering content to be developed for online distribution. It informs them about what a particular subset of the online community are actively engaged in reading, viewing and searching for. Skyhook tracks device signals over time to accurately predict consumer intent and to enable location-targeted advertising. The gathered data ‘provides both personalization and context’ (Rogers, 2016).

Soraia Ferreira is a transmedia producer who develops ‘purpose stories’ for the business community (Ferreira, interview 2016). The objective of her work is to convey pertinent information to the business audience, short sound bites of detail rather than entertainment. The story elements within each platform are self-contained and readers are encouraged to progress onto other media if they want to read more. Krishna Stott of Bellyfeel has produced a wide range of transmedia titles and interactive experiences for the music sector. By using prototypes of his stories during development, he positions the interaction points of a narrative at the moments where the audience is ‘naturally inclined’ to engage (Stott, interview 2016). Stott avoids using ‘large chunks of linear media’ followed by a sudden and disruptive interaction. Instead, he prefers to make viewer interaction an ‘expected’ part of the experience and so keeps the audience connecting regularly with the story. Stott recommends The Stanley Parable (2013) as an example of a highly creative, experimental interactive narrative. A story narrator provides dramatic exposition, but the audience (as the protagonist) can choose whether or not to follow his ‘instructions’. If not, the narrator delivers admonishments and encourages a return to the ‘proper path’. The Stanley Parable considers the very nature of rules and constraints within interactive narratives. The interactive promos Neon Bible (2007) and Reflektor (2013) are creative music videos by the band Arcade Fire. The latter is an experiential piece that allows the viewer to insert themselves into the work. Stott believes transmedia storytelling has the potential to create new business models which are ‘naturally immune to piracy due to the granular form of content’ (Stott, interview 2016).

STORY-DEVELOPMENT TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGIES

Story-development tools such as Atavist (media-rich content creation) and VoiceMap (location-aware audio experiences) facilitate the creation of interactive narratives. FrameTrail allows you to produce interactive video content directly in your browser. Online app builders such as Thunkable enables the creation of fully native apps by non-coders. Conductrr is a cloud-based content management system for storytelling. A timeline calendar of ‘triggers’ is used to schedule content publishing across multiple platforms including email, blogs, social media, websites and mobile. Scripted social interactions allow characters to respond to particular phrases with pre-scripted replies (Conductrr, 2016). iBeacon technologies can trigger push messages and prompts to smartphone apps, enabling story elements to be delivered at specific geographical locations. Emotiv calculates metrics related to brain activity and facial expressions to produce a hands-free brain-controlled interface. Metagram (2016) is a glasses-free holographic film system that uses ‘AR to build narrative experiences in the real world’ (Lindquist, interview 2016). ‘Holograms’ can be ‘seen from multiple angles by multiple people’. Their first film End of the Line (2016), was a Hitchcock-inspired murder mystery where the audience’s interpretation and knowledge of the plot depended on their observational position. Viewers later conferred to share their discoveries, to learn what really happened in the story. This perspectival approach to storytelling is also used in Eko’s Broken Night (2017), a short VR film (lasting 8–9½ minutes) starring Emily Mortimer in which you decide which character to follow during four critical moments of a particularly tense drama. The aim was to test individual engagement within a visceral immersive experience. There is no interface and the interaction is driven by emotion. The viewer follows the character that they find to be most interesting at any particular point in the narrative. The result is a varying perspective on the characters and plot depending on where you were and what you saw.

AUGMENTED REALITY

vStream Digital Media has developed an AR solution for the Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One Team using Epson Moverio glasses. This unique VIP virtual tour of a Mercedes Formula One garage utilises a holographic display to dynamically create an AR experience (Williams, interview 2017). An actor accompanies the participant to guide their progress and to deliver a customised narrative arc. This system places the latest Epson technologies in the hands of ‘decision makers and budget holders of leading corporations’ (Williams, interview 2016), potential investors in the technology itself. vStream project developer Jermain Williams pays particular attention to how people think when developing these experiential products. He uses gamification techniques, psychological rewards, directional sound and other narrative devices to focus the participant’s attention on the most important story elements at each particular point in the narrative. The subtle manipulation of the audience’s attention is similar to a magician’s sleight-of-hand, diverting their gaze to control awareness and to influence decisions. The audience is given the illusion of navigational freedom when in fact their story choices are predictable and expected.

RECREATING THE THEATRE EXPERIENCE

Camille Donegan seeks to bring the ‘liveness’ and interactive role play of Forum theatre to her VR projects (Donegan, interview 2017). With Forum theatre the audience can interact directly with actors on stage, add dialogue to scenes and give directions. Donegan recommends Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (2011) where the player participates in a ‘living performance’, an adaptation of Macbeth. The setting is the fictional McKittrick Hotel which contains a number of story vignettes that a player can explore. As they navigate the physical space, they are guided by a ‘remote actor’, who could be located anywhere in the world and whose text-based instructions are interpreted by MIT-built software to ‘control’ various on-set props. The remote actor receives random visual updates on the player’s location. They are encouraged to cause mischief and to make the player jump. The player interacts with both stage actors and this series of VR elements. RFID (radio-frequency identification) and Bluetooth technologies allow the remote actor to geo-locate narrative surprises at the most opportune times within the story experience. The Danish creative media agency Makropol created The Doghouse (2015), an interactive 18-minute dinner scene viewed by five people at a time via Oculus Rift headsets. Producer Mads Damsbo calls the individual experience of each viewer a ‘subjective reality’ (Mufson, 2015). The film was shot as 40 complete run-throughs, with actors wearing fisheye-lensed GoPro cameras on bicycle helmets. This allows each viewer to see a particular perspective of the dinner, each slightly different depending on their character’s viewpoint and interpretation of events.

Donegan is exploring the commercial advantages of using VR in eLearning. The ‘face-to-face’ quality of immersive VR has the potential to provide a more successful training experience and is also scalable. However, she notes that measurements of user engagement will need to be developed and quantified. Metrics of analysis may include biofeedback (sweat and pulse), facial expressions, voice and gestures. An example of this is the Psious VR platform which monitors a patient’s physiology to measure their anxiety response to certain virtual stimuli. This behavioural health technology company uses cognitive therapy techniques within a virtual experience to treat phobias and anxieties. Donegan wants to measure engagement while the learner role-plays within a virtual theatrical environment.

Mat Collishaw recreated Henry Fox Talbot’s ‘seminal’ photography exhibition which was originally staged at King Edward’s School, Birmingham in 1839. Thresholds (2017) is a VR experience where users can navigate a CGI recreation of the original room where Fox Talbot’s images were displayed. This is particularly resonant as the original images have significantly deteriorated and are now stored in darkened vaults. Thresholds incorporates a physical dimension into the exhibition where visitors can ‘touch real objects and feel real sensations that correspond with what they see in the virtual world – whether it’s the warmth of a fire or the mouldings on the wall’ (Ellis-Peterson, 2017).

Transmedia storytelling offers a unique audience experience. The participating reader/viewer is drawn into the story space and their engagement is accurately measured using data metrics and tracking technologies. Their profile is used to guide the selection of customised content. Martin Reiser suggests we are witnessing the birth of a new art form that ‘that lives in the hybrid world of the new “Hertzian” spaces and in the creative mind of its new audiences; simultaneously addressing both the heimlich of place and the unheimlich of digital space’ (Koenitz et al, 2015 p. 255): the familiar and the unfamiliar that exists in the physical interactivity between an electronic device and a person.