Bellyfeel visit multiplatform production

Our second guest speaker, Krishna Stott of Bellyfeel, came in last Friday, 11^th March 2016 to offer some of his sage reflections on the world of transmedia and multiplatform storytelling, with a presentation entitled, ‘How transmedia storyworlds save the future of storytelling’.

Krishna comes from a background of carefully crafted perhaps traditional moving image storytelling; this was significant in helping students profoundly understand, that aesthetics and story remain as primary tools for engaging an audience, even in our multi-stranded and multi-distracted context. The importance of this engagement, to empathise with and then immerse our audience was underlined… Story + Audience = Storyworld.

Krishna gave a very succinct definition for the term, transmedia…..

“Interactive stories delivered across multiple platforms in a way that is expansive rather than repetitive.”

Krishna has been involved in multiplatform storytelling since 1995,  creating interactive dramas such as Crimeface, transmedia prototypes such as, The Alexander Wilson Project and more recently, People’s Stories, an interactive storytelling community built alongside Terence Davies’s feature film “Of Time and the City”. Currently live, is the transmedia thriller,“Bolton Storyworld – Codename: Winterhill” which you can sign up to participate in here.

Krishna provided some great insights in the development of transmedia projects. One being that storyworlds should be bounded. That is, not to allow a pointless and infinite expansion over time or ‘space’. As a kind of illustration, Krishna used a big red balloon to symbolise the storyworld, a balloon stretched with extra story content, much of which might be provided by us, the participants. What this balloon really illustrated however, was that if burst (which it did, loudly), you are left with a simple linear strand….a bit stretchy but 2D and linear.