I finally met Lucas in person at the Storyworld Conference. He is a lovely and intelligent young man with a lot of passion for his craft. Although we could tell this with his active postings at his company blog, Silverstring Media, he is even better in person. Now Lucas has generously offered to share some crucial lessons he has learned from his first major jump into creating a reactive story online here.

Before we delve into those lessons, some quick info about his background. Lucas had a job as a creative intern at an ad agency where he resides in Vancouver; he has done a bit of freelance PR writing; and was a trainee assistant director on a TV show in the summer of 2010. Some of his published short stories are “Flip City” in the Queer Wolf anthology, a more recent piece he’s “very proud of”, “Subtle Poison”, is in the anthology Speaking Out. His stageplay Life: A Play was performed as part of the Brave New Play Rites Reading Series at UBC in 2009, and his stage monologue Revelations is published at the Good Ear Review online.

Now to his lessons – I’ve included a bit of a dialogue between Lucas and I after each lesson too. Enjoy!

Seven Lessons
At the start of this year, I launched an experimental transmedia story called Azrael’s Stop. After a few months of lacklustre audience and a structure swamped in problems, I affirmed that yes, I do in fact suck at transmedia.

But as we all aspire to do, I have learned from the experience — and furthermore implemented that learning to attempt to repair Azrael’s Stop and re-launched it this November. In the spirit of You Suck At Transmedia, I’d like to share a few of the lessons I learned along the way — and hope you’ll join me in an ongoing self-evaluation of the project.

Lesson #1: Quality. Speed. Cost. Choose two.
Not a new lesson, but a problem I thought I could work around. (Spoiler: I couldn’t.) I designed Azrael’s Stop to be something I could produce quickly and cheaply and get out into the world — the story is told through daily serialized microfiction, tweet-sized bits of story that build over time. I figured I could pump out a bunch of these quickly and easily without actually losing too much quality of writing.

The quality I was losing, though, was in the overall project, not the writing — I didn’t have time to really plan, I didn’t have strong design elements, I honestly didn’t think through all the possible ways people would come at the project and problems they would face. But I thought I could work on the quality later, after I got things going.

But once I had started, I was just trying to keep up with the content along with whatever else I was working on. In the end, I did catch up on the quality side — after I had pulled the plug, gone on hiatus, and went back to the drawing board to fix it. Thus sacrificing speed. Lesson learned.

CD: “Choose two” – hehe, I like that. I’m also working on a project that can be produced cheaply and quicker than say a feature film, but I’m finding that I can’t have speed without cost. If I could pay people to do things, then production would move faster and we could do more things!

LJ: I would love to be able to pay the people who have worked with me on this — and besides just wanting to compensate them for what they’ve done, it would also help solidify the relationship and contractualize deadlines more effectively, not to mention allow them (and me) to focus on this project rather than do it in our spare time. You definitely can’t have it all.

Lesson #2: It’s never as easy as you think it will be.
Daily tweets. How hard could that be? I can write 140 characters a day, no problem. Though I also wanted to have some bonus content, monthly extras that maybe I could make money on, things like longer short stories and music and audio plays and interactive fiction games and comics. And suddenly there was a lot more work involved. Those things required a lot more time and effort, and collaboration with friends who, by the way, had their own deadlines to deal with as well. Not to mention the fact that producing a project like this isn’t just about making the content. Once you’ve made the content, you still have to promote it. Write it up. Sell it. Not to mention maintaining it, fixing problems as they come up. Plan for more work than you assume. And give yourself the time to do it right.

CD: Ooo yeah. The trailer for my project took much longer than planned, due to some
unexpected factors. But what I remind myself over and over again is that projects are
always like that. They always blow out time-wise (especially in experimental projects)
because of unforeseen events. In the end, it isn’t about knowing everything that can go
wrong, it is how you deal with the stuff that does. It is kind of a world-view that I find not
everyone shares…and so one of the things I’m working on at the moment is how to
facilitate that kind of culture. Any ideas?

LJ: I think a big part of it is having the right team — a team that is motivated and interested in the project and wants it to succeed as much as you. And then furthermore being as clear as possible in communicating expectations with the team as far as how to deal with problems and perhaps whose responsibility it may be. Not always easy conversations to have, though.

Lesson #3: Have a plan.
Nothing worse than launching without any real idea where you’re going. You’re just asking for a host of problems to crop up out of the blue. You don’t need everything fleshed out, but have an outline for the whole project — and that includes where it’s ending. Both you and your audience should know how much time they’re expecting to devote to your story. A plan lets you know when something big is coming, so you can devote enough time to it, so you can prepare properly and make sure everyone on your team is on the same page and committed. A plan will also give you a better sense of your whole project, so you can hopefully see where there are problems in your structure, or opportunities to do cooler things. I went into the project with it being very open-ended, and as a result, it quickly got away from me and was in some ways aimless. This time, I know what I’m doing and where I’m going. Not everything is written — but everything is planned.

CD: Yeah, nice. It sounds like you really jumped into the deep end! Even your experience is in the extreme in that you started without an outline, I’ve also found there are certain things that help when you’re knee-deep in the “live” madness. As a writer and designer, you have lots of information in your head and perhaps in shared documents. But some decisions just really need to happen quickly (or you at least want them to). This is where I’ve found having some basic “essence elements” on hand helps. If I know what the theme or message of my project is, that informs/constrains my decisions. If I know what
my character wants and what they need (as two competing drives), then I can usually act in their voice fairly easily. Lucas, what sort of stuff do you do for planning now?

LJ: I now have a full bible for the project, at about 13,000 words, which nails down exactly those thematic elements as well as the look and feel of the project. It also has complete character descriptions, personalities, and the arcs the characters go through, so I know where it’s all going. Separately, I’ve also created a rough outline of the entire year-long story that incorporates all those character journeys, and I have a good idea of what I want my bonus content to be each month so I can plan ahead and find collaborators where necessary.

Lesson #4: Set the stage.
Your audience has to know what they’re getting into from the very start — both from a structural point of view (How much time are you asking them to commit? What’s the duration of the experience? Are you asking for interaction? UGC? Or just passive consumption?) and a story point of view (set up the main characters, the setting, the conflict; give the audience something to care about).

Structurally, if they don’t know what they’re getting into, they won’t trust you, and they won’t be happy when you ask more of them than they assumed. Story-wise, they just won’t care and won’t give you the benefit of the doubt for long enough to pull them in. Hook them early.

CD: Yeah, totally agree. I remember one of the big lessons hypertext fiction writers learnt: that a big difference between a book and an online narrative is the reader knows how big the book is and where they are in it. Motivation to act is closely linked to urgency at times and so people need to know when to act. I recognising that with my current project being a very different way to experience the web, and with players coming with different expectations, I need to make it clear what it is about and what they will do. So my next milestone is to create a playable trailer. I also recall a quote from Andra Sheffer, when she said if you don’t hook your online audience within the first 10 seconds you’re dead. Heavy stuff, but good to keep in mind. As indies, we have to address craft, art and publicity!

LJ: Not easy at the best of times. That design of the user experience is so vital — and thus my next lesson!

Lesson #5: Everything is a barrier to entry.
There are millions of things on the internet that people will entertain themselves with. And watching a cat video is so much easier than registering for your site so they can scroll backwards through some tweets to understand what’s going on.

At some point, some barriers to entry are ok — if you’re looking for player interaction, that’s a barrier to entry, but it might be a necessary one for the structure of your project. A paywall is certainly a barrier to entry, but again could be necessary at some point! But just be aware what is a barrier and that every one will lose you some audience members.

That includes necessary site registration. It includes just moving from one medium to another. It includes forms of media people aren’t familiar with — like interactive fiction. It even includes using Twitter, as I discovered — there are still a lot of people who aren’t on Twitter, don’t understand Twitter, and frankly don’t want to understand Twitter.

Barriers to entry also include things that stop people from getting involved in the middle of a project. Make sure it’s easy for people to get caught up on the story and jump in. Make sure if people miss a week because they were on vacation, they’re going to be able to get back in.

CD: Yeah, I like the term “friction points”. They are a major design consideration in transmedia projects, or just any highly dispersed projects. Easy to enter is one thing, but also there is the power of a good content. I read a study that found people who followed a particular topic (entertainment gossip), went everywhere and anywhere to get it. People are platform-agnostic when the content leads them. They don’t think about moving across platforms or obstacles when they’re following content they want. So on
the one hand we have the need for design that recognises friction points, and on the other hand we need to remember that content is part of that design strategy.

LJ: Yes! I think there’s also a point to make though that people have an intrinsic understanding of how to get something like entertainment gossip (that it can come from TV, magazines, the internet), whereas getting them to understand that a piece of prose fiction can be delivered online via tiny pieces every day along with music and video and things may yet be something not intrinsic for a lot of people.

Lesson #6: Everything is a balance.
The more you ask from your audience, the less audience you will have. You can’t have both a huge audience that is also deeply engaged. If you give the audience control over the narrative, you’re going to lose control yourself. Everything is some kind of balancing act. In my case it was the balance between not asking a lot from my audience (I was only asking them to read a little bit of content a day) and asking enough to get them engaged (one tweet is not enough). I missed that balance. Now I have an introductory story, more content to hook them, and then the microfiction (which I present in much better ways than before as well). You can’t have everything, so pick your battles.

CD: Could you tell me more about how you’re planning on addressing different audiences now?

LJ: Part of it, which was always my plan but which I’m putting extra focus on now, is not making the bonus content — the music, the audio play, the game, and whatever else I devise — necessary to follow the story. So if you don’t know how to play an interactive fiction game and don’t care to figure it out, that’s ok.

Another big part is making sure the content is accessible in as many ways as possible — no longer just on Twitter, you can now get it on Facebook, Tumblr, or on its own dedicated website (with an RSS feed and email subscription). And if you don’t want tiny chunks every day but instead want to consume it all at once, I’m compiling each month of content into single pages on the site, as chapters on Scribd, Wattpad, and Book Country, and as downloadable PDFs.

Having a “Story So Far” page and a “Start Here” page will also hopefully make it easy for people to access the story even if they weren’t there from the start — a very clear step-by-step explanation of what this is and how best to experience it.

CD: Ooo, I should mention I cover some of the early attempts at making dispersed stories more approachable in this essay (PDF) and continue on the online augmentation to the essay.

Lesson #7: Promote yourself.
Your own networks aren’t enough. Unless you have thousands of Facebook fans and Twitter followers and blog readers, you won’t get word out far enough just by flogging your project on your own networks. (If you can, you’ve probably already done this step many many times.) What few RTs you get won’t be enough. Go where your audience is, to forums and blogs and news sites and put your stuff in front of eyeballs. Make deals with other creators. Bring in collaborators who will flog it to their own networks. Guest blog. Publicize.

CD: And here he is! hehe. Yeah, the next major stage of publicity for my project will be doing publicity outside of my networks. I’ll also share one thing I realised – that your peer network/audience is not necessarily your creative audience. It is one thing to have a network of colleagues, but that network won’t necessarily be into your creative work and your creative project will appeal to new people.

LJ: Absolutely! The trick will be finding those methods of publicity outside these channels. It will come, but it will be work ^_^

***
All of which is not to say I don’t still suck at transmedia. But I’m learning! Hopefully you are too. And hopefully the things I’ve learned will help make Azrael’s Stop a better and successful project. Check it out at azraelsstop.com, and let me know!

Thank you so much Lucas for sharing your lessons!

I read this article the other day about the “National Theatre’s screw up“, and it reminded me of a time I screwed up in an ARG. I have of course screwed up more than once, but the article reminded me of a specific event. The article discusses a tweet sent out through the National Theatre twitter account, a tweet that involved pretty crass swearing about another person. The article notes how people responded with understanding to the error:

Rather than berate the theatre for such a terrible lapse of protocol or judgement, the audience acknowledged it for it was – a mistake, and an oddly funny one at that. And as we can see from the representative responses above, the theatre inadvertently presented itself as being fallible, human and honest. Whether it was a lapse in judgement, or just an errant slip of the keys – sending tweets from the wrong account – it nonetheless made the institution a little bit more likable in the eyes of its followers. Just for one brief moment, the National Theatre let a personality shine through the cracks.

And then the article continues, lamenting how the National Theatre then tried to deny the incident:

However, the theatre’s response to all of the above saw them revert swiftly, and sadly, back to type. Rather than admit that someone on staff had clearly stuffed up, or perhaps a disgruntled former employee still knew their login passwords, the theatre instead deleted the post and announced that they “believed(ed)” that they had been hacked.

The article then eloquently explains why this response was antithetical to contemporary interaction:

Two guiding principles in social media, we believe, are to Be Human and Be Honest. Had the National Theatre adopted either policy, they might have done themselves a service. To err is human, and ‘being human’ is increasingly what we respond to when bumping into organisations online. Social media differs from traditional marketing by asking us to ‘be human’, to drop our guard a little and be conversational – to get in amongst our audience and act like ‘real people’ (this shouldn’t be terribly difficult, we are ‘real people’ after all).

I completely agree. Now, what I recalled with my mistake was the time I signed off under my own name not as my character when conversing with the player. I felt terrible (and now create a signature in my character emails so I can’t make that mistake again), and wanted to do something about it. The player emailed back to me, continuing the conversation we were having, and also made a quick funny remark about my slip. The question was how to respond. I wanted to make some clever remark about the slip in-character in some way, but the team voted that I respond to the conversation, and not say anything about the slip. I did so, and the player and I continued to have some interaction in-character.

But what I feel is that there was a great opportunity for the player and I to bond at that point. By not acknowledging it in some way, I sent a message to the player that I was uncomfortable about the slip and wanted them to forget about it. I did feel terrible about the slip, but I didn’t feel uncomfortable about it. I wanted to use it. I understand that there are situations where you don’t want to move too far out from behind the curtain. You want to keep the player immersed. But I think at times an unacknowledged slip can do more harm than a slip.

I remember another ARG where I had the freaky occurrence (there are always freaky occurrences during ARGs). The name of a character I had murdered in the plot, and their profession, was exactly the same as a friend of one of the players. That friend had the same profession and had been murdered too, in real life. The player emailed me (the character) and told me about it. I thought the only ethical thing to do was to email the person directly as a game-master (not as a character), and apologise. I offered to downplay the murder victim or even change the plot if it disturbs them. I sincerely was prepared to change the plot if needed. But they emailed back that the person who died would of loved this coincidence, and so it became a kind of a homage to them. The issue was therefore resolved, the game could go ahead without any feelings of discomfort from both the player and myself, and we bonded. None of this would of happened if I hadn’t emailed directly and said the things I sincerely wanted to.

I recall people saying a couple of times during the reveal of the Rachel Webster person as a character in J.C. Hutchin’s Personal Effects ARG, that the actions of a team and the characters after a hoax are more important than the hoax (intentional or not) occurring in the first place. All of these experiences, and my previous thoughts about sucking, all show me how your response to imperfection is more important than ignoring imperfection.

Now that sounds like a weird title, doesn’t it? What do I mean by ‘actualising your depictions’? What I’m referring to is the depiction of a character searching the internet, or having a social media conversation in a video, and then not having them seeded online. That is: I hate it when I watch characters doing things on the Internet (in a film, TV show or webisode) and then I (of course) jump online to see the evidence of their activity only to find it isn’t there or it is different. I witnessed this recently and so that is why I decided to rant about it now. It was also done by a person/company that didn’t intend to do a transmedia project and so I’m not giving them a bad time, necessarily. So, what happened?

A couple of days ago Twitter announced the forthcoming launch of the New Twitter:

As many (most) of you would of noticed, the character in the video tweets a pic. I, of course, went straight to the character’s Twitter page (who turns out to be the guy who makes the Twitter videos – which is fine, nice meta). I’m happy to see Jeremy Brigg’s (@gigglebriggs) page does intend have the tweets featured in the video (see screenshot below):

BUT, when I open up the Twitpic it is not the same image as the one depicted in the video:

Source: http://twitpic.com/2mty7m

Source: Screenshot from video

The image is by another person, and is a similar image (of a moon), but is not the image depicted in the video and is by someone else. This sucks. It sucks because it is clear the Twitter implementation is not considered part of the video experience (although it is half-way there). It is clear the creators didn’t think anyone would notice or care. Only the video matters.

This situation is emblematic of a pre-transmedia mindset. In the past (and many times in the present), creators think only about the main medium and don’t care about what the experience across media is like. They start to make an effort but if they don’t decide to make each medium a meaningful and equal part of the experience then it is treated as lesser.

Consider this example from the Godsend movie, where a character searches online for a (fictional) corporation.

I did have images of the character viewing the webpage but I cannot find it in my numerous backups over the years (probably in the two external hard drives I have that are still corrupted). In this scene the character searches and views a corporation. If you went to the website, it existed, but it looked different to the page depicted in the film:

Now the webpage has been taken over by someone who has taken all the images out and has put ads there (obviously taking advantage of the traffic they’re getting). The lack of continuity from the website in the film to the online version annoyed me. I then do of course love it when conversations and sites are actualised with continuity. For instance, I enjoyed watching this Jake and Amir video back in 2008:

And then jumping into Twitter to find the character’s posts as they occurred in the video:

Now, obviously you cannot view these tweets after the watching the video now. That is one problem with creating authentic social media conversations after a broadcast or screening. But it is bloody fun when you do catch it.

Do people really care though? Since the release of the New Twitter video, there are now over 1.500 views of the Twitpic alluded to in the video, and comments by people. And as I like to cite, multiple visits and comments at a website created by a fan for a website depicted in the Bourne Ultimatum. The character Jason Bourne searches Google for an investment company, Sewell and Marbury. The site is there and depicted in the movie. But the site hadn’t been created by the producers and so a fan secured it and created it to a small degree according to the fiction at www.sewellmarbury.com. The website was created in 2007 and has had to date over one-thousand comments from people all over the world (more would have visited the site and not left a comment).

I talk about this example and how a domain name, password, social media account, email and phone number glimpsed in a TV show or film is a powerful call to action to many people. So, it sucks when this opportunity is ignored, misunderstood or used to ill effect.