NEWS 397: Transmedia Indiana

News 397: Transmedia Indiana

Transmedia Indiana is an interdisciplinary immersive learning course and one of the first of its kind in the country. In this class, we will develop of a multi-layered transmedia narrative focused on artifacts from the Indiana State Museum. Transmedia narratives are an emergent storytelling form that takes a single cohesive story, breaks it up into pieces and then tells that story in a non-linear way across multiple mediums. Our narrative will have several components

• A fictional story that stands alone as a single book, e.g., The DaVinci Code or National Treasure;
• A series of non-fiction websites built around historical artifacts from the museum that relate to the fictional storyline;
• An interactive mobile app for e-Readers (e.g. Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iPad) through which audiences can read — and experience — the story;
• A live event that completes the story, which will culminate at the museum and showcase the artifacts that the story revolves around.

The audience will be invited into the story through a series of “rabbit holes,” opening puzzles, videos and blog posts that act as teasers. These teasers help both attract an audience and set up the narrative. The story is then slowly revealed to the community through emails, videos, audio, text messages, blog posts and other media. As the story progresses, the participants are asked “help” with the narrative by solving more complicated puzzles and creating small pieces of media. That interaction is then built into the narrative, creating an immersive experience for both reader and storyteller.

Assignment Rubrics

• Production Journal
• Pre-Report
• Story Production Materials
• Live Event
• Benchmark Presentations
• Book
• Post Mortem