The DGR system is different - it's driven by passive audiences (bloggers and microbloggers) and then synthesized into character, which then generates narrative.
I say narrative rather than storytelling as the later is a predefined tale, narrative is something that evolves, mutates, unfolds. Creating Transmedia narratives is also requires Free Culture principles because the cross platform spreading and scaling needs to have freedoms of use built into the design.
Marcus has been whittling away with his DGR Sibling, Felix Freeman, creating a text based story based upon the Sibling's Tweeting which, inspired by this Super F*cking Awesome Social Media Douchebag video, has now evolved into a short film. Check it out.
What is happening here is akin to Wikipedia, culture is being filtered into a piece of media just as every subject matter is being converted into a web page, which can then be reused by anyone due to the Creative Commons Attribute ShareAlike licence.
Marcus says,
"Although this little clip is a very rough sketch (that’s not Felix’s voice, I have a very different voice in my head for Felix) it helps to make Felix just that little bit more real. This is quite an exciting step. Suddenly the full potential of Felix as a character can be seen; you can see him in other contexts, like games or little short films and he is suddenly much more human that he was a twitter bot. He’s becoming the most interesting character I’ve created to date."Felix in video form is not a million miles away from 80's cult figure Max Headroom - embodying satire within simulacra, portraying the locus of the loquacious.
Which is useful for all kinds of commercial arts endeavors when trying to catch the waves of culture - because it's the real thing.
When Happiness Factory arrived on our screens (your mobile, *tubes, teleboxes, ipods et al), the premise was to extend it beyond the 30 second advert - a universe of characters awaiting to be discovered, played with, promoted and loved. Lead by masters of 'finding the brand's voice' - Weiden and Kennedy, we're seeing socialized media unfolding as immersive storytelling. As beautiful as it is, it's not 'opening happiness' in a way that culture operates well. Culture is emergent, immersion is a static spectacle.
The dominance of a centralized editorial is something that transmedia producers are questioning - "What does a transmedia audienceship look like?" is a good starter. It questions the canonical authority of storytelling because the influence of the audiences' opinion is a reason for cultural production in the first place. Just as Twitter plays with the emotional disposition of marketing, voice and participation, the mechanistic voice of an authors creation through reproduction of their work opens the oppotunity for the reader to supplant their own voice within the characters profile. If the reader 'completes' the characterization, how far should that go?
So, if you fancy trying a little experiment for us, have a go at recording yourself reading the script of the film Marcus made - the one at the top of this blog post.
Soundcloud seems like a good service to upload the audio to and Marcus will edit in your voice to the original video. Make sure you apply this Creative Commons licence to your voice recording so that he can do this all nice and legally.
It will be fascinating to see where this goes.
Leave a message in the comments below if you want to play along.
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