The Future of Transmedia Storytelling Essays - Marketing

The Future of Transmedia Storytelling Since the beginning of humanity, storytelling has been an essential part of growth and development allowing individuals to share information. The first forms of storytelling included gestures, drawings, and vocalizations. As humanity evolved, more advanced communication developed. For example, storytelling evolved to using language and text. Today, there are various forms of communication, and storytelling continues to be essential in our society for transferring information in the form of transmedia. Relative to time, transmedia is very new. The use of transmedia requires a variety of media outlets and mediums. The way in which storytelling is implemented has developed critically making it hard to consider how advanced technology will become in the future. Some possibilities of transmedia that may appear in the future include virtual reality movies and shows and advertisement development. These new changes can be attributed to the increasingly infrequent use of physical books and newspapers. Many businesses use transmedia to share their stories through advertisements. Advertisements are a modern form of storytelling that can be quite effective. With the large amount of media outlets and different people watching each one, utilizing as many outlets as possible ensures that many people will hear and learn about the business. In the future, advertisements will continue to develop. Furthermore, the number of commercials and advertisements in media has Increased rapidly within the past decade. In addition, the length of commercials on TV have lengthened significantly. Websites and applications such as YouTube, Pandora, Facebook, and many others have added advertisements in between songs and videos. This trend will continue to expand across more popular websites and applications. Furthermore, the amount of time people spend viewing a screen every day is increasing and will likely continue increasing. This trend leads to more exposure to advertisements as their screen time increases and more applications and websites implement advertisements. Screens and advertisements go hand in hand. As more things become accessible from the leisure of your home, more people will utilize technology to gain and transfer information. This is common in our culture: a sense of speed and ease. Another form of advertisement that will appear more frequently is advertisements within linked devices. Today the linkage between electrical devices is become becoming more apparent. As the moves in that direction so will advisements. Your phone, alarm clock, music, car, TV, and any other electronics will be all synced together. The future of advertisements will also follow this pattern. Advertisements will be a part of all these linked devices. (Wong) As technology continues to advance, the way stories are told is also changing. For example, the advancements in virtual reality have been improving each year. Just as virtual reality video games allow individuals to experience the game themselves as if they were truly physically there, movies have the potential to get there as well. An individual would be able to watch a movie while moving around in that setting, experiencing the movie firsthand. In fact, IMAX and Google are coordinating and creating plans to invent a virtual reality camera (Cuthbertson). In addition, this would allow individuals to view the same movie repeatedly, but from different vantage points. Furthermore, there was a movie released in 2008 named Vantage Point which portrayed one incident from three different vantage points. The actual event captured was only about half hour in length. Similarly, this is how the "virtual reality" movie experience would work. A viewer could watch the movie multiple times, disc overing novel and interesting details each time. Currently, there are 360 video clips, but they are limited and have a person stay in one stationary spot versus moving around. Virtual reality movies are another way that storytelling will occur in transmedia. In addition to virtual reality movies, TV shows will also adapt to this new feature. The difference could be the possibility of including virtual reality commercials in television. A possible example of this would be including commercials that require individuals to complete a short task to continue watching the show. Presently, commercials implement visual aids to keep viewers entertained, but virtual reality commercials would rely more on tasks or game like commercials to reach the same goal. Furthermore, as the internet, movies, and video games continue