A quasi-marketing function is getting some respect at the Producer Guild of America! The PGA just approved a screen credit for “Transmedia Producer.”
“As technology evolves, it’s no longer adequate to think of a project as simply a television show or a movie,” PGA President Marshall Herskovitz says in a press release announcing the new screen credit. “We now understand that the audience will want to experience that content across several platforms – online, mobile, VOD, Blu-Ray, and now iPad – often with different or additional material.”
The PGA defines this as a “project or franchise of one that consists of three (or more) narrative story-lines existing within the same fictional universe on any of the following platforms: Film, Television, Short Film, Broadband, Publishing, Comics, Animation, Mobile, Special Venues, DVD/Blu-ray/CD-ROM, Narrative Commercial and Marketing roll-outs, and other technologies that may or may not currently exist. These narrative extensions are NOT the same as re-purposing material from one platform to be cut or repurposed to different platforms.”
The PGA continues, “A transmedia producer credit is given to the person(s) responsible for a significant portion of a project’s long-term planning, development, production, and/or maintenance of narrative continuity across multiple platforms, and creation of original story-lines for new platforms. Transmedia producers also create and implement interactive endeavors to unite the audience of the property with the canonical narrative and this element should be considered as valid qualification for credit as long as they are related directly to the narrative presentation of a project.”
It’s at least partly a marketing function because it brings content from a single movie to an assortment of media platforms, of which some are clearly designed to promote the flagship cinema movie, such as narrative commercial, mobile and online. But as the PGA explanation above says, the new credit isn’t for a literal translation across media but for someone who builds on the story line.
“With content no longer available as a discrete single-platform experience, but an expansive and immersive one, it takes a savvy producer to assess and manage the wealth of multi-platform possibilities available to a great story,” says the PGA press release. A seminar devoted to Transmedia Producer and hosted by Jeff Gomez of Starlight Runner Entertainment is planned by the PGA.
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