Abstract
In this era of media convergence, transmedia storytelling has emerged as a distinct new form of narrative activity taking place across multiple interconnected media platforms. The new interconnectedness of multiple media platforms through a narrative whole, so-called connected narration, affects the way in which transmedia projects are being produced, which in turn affects the process of script and project development. Collaborative writing across different industries is called for in the production of any transmedia world. Research on transmedia storytelling and world-building has thus far neglected the German market; equally, the script and content development process has received hardly any sustained analytical attention. This chapter sheds light on German transmedia content development process. It examines the complex relationship between the creative process and the finished product of a transmedia series by following an interdisciplinary approach, based on poetics, combining the qualitative analysis of the German transmedia project Netwars/out of CTRL (2014–) with interviews with German creators of transmedia series.
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Notes
- 1.
Ryan (2013, n.p.) also knows two distinct forms of transmedia storyworlds: snowball effect projects generate a variety of prequels, fan fiction, and transmedial adaptations on account of the popularity of their core text, while a systems project is ‘conceived from the very beginning as a project that develops over many different media platforms. Storyworlds become commercial franchises, and the purpose of the developers is to get the public to consume as many different media as possible’. Weaver’s (2013, p. 8) two approaches to transmedia storytelling are called native and additive: ‘you either create a story that can only be told across multiple platforms or you take a story from one medium and add other media to it to deepen the world created in the focus medium’.
- 2.
Round table conversations are not comparable to a writer’s room with a strict hierarchy and rules, rather they are more informal discussions and exchange in order to update each other.
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Renger, S. (2021). ‘You Never Know Who is in Control’: German Transmedia Content Development. In: Taylor, S., Batty, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_39
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