 Why NZ On Air does transmedia? At NZ On Air we fund diverse New Zealand content. We fund television, music, radio, community broadcasting, and more recently, digital media. And the idea is that we have, with digital media funding, a very strong focus on audiences. And we want to make people think a little bit, well, within the digital strategy, we want people to engage with content, we want people to be able to find content, and we want to be able to think a little bit past tally on the web. So we're not taking digital with NZ On Air as being like House of Cards on TV. We're talking about something that is a little bit more pushing it. We use digital media to reach specific audiences, and part of that is understanding how the audiences are using the digital platforms that we have. And as it turns out, they're actually using them quite a lot. So an example of a transmedia project that we've funded is the Factory Story. Has anybody seen that or heard of that one? Cool. Our focus a couple of years ago with this fund, with digital media funding, was on Pacific Island audiences. It turns out that's one of the biggest, largest groups of users of mobile data, particularly in Auckland. And so we wanted to target the projects towards audiences that weren't being best served by mainstream media. And we've chosen different pockets of audiences at different times. And this particular project started out as a quite a successful stage play. It got evolved into an idea for a web series. But in creating the web series concept, the people took a brightly coloured bus, and they took that bus into the communities around Auckland, and they auditioned for actors to be in the series. They asked Canvas for songs and ideas and storylines and jokes to be included. They got people to vote on who would be from the auditions. They then put up videos and blogs of people. They got people to vote on who would be included in the series. And then they put the series together, and they were publishing that at the same time the characters had Facebook profiles, and they had blogs and so on. And actually, I think this was a really successful series. It reached over 250,000 people. And with a Pacific Island audience, that was actually really engaged on social media. It was talking about it a lot. And I think in that sense, it worked quite well. The other project that year was the Coco Net. And Coco Net TV is a hub for Pacific Island content. And it is transmedia. It's not so much a project that has a lot of different interlocking pieces, but it's a place that brings together content that people submit. So there's a sort of a travel log. Pacific Island is around the world submitting in stories of where they live and where they've been. There's a know your roots, a sort of interactive timeline of events that have happened throughout different Pacific Islands. There are a whole series of how-to videos, like how to tie a lava lava, how to dodge a flying jandal, how to make an umu, sort of a mixture of comedy and quite serious stuff. And increasingly, there's a really, really strong social media component to this. So most of the things, visits that these guys get, they're getting 40,000, 50,000 visits a month through their Facebook page and through their YouTube channel. And those videos are shared massively and talked about and commented on massively, specifically by the Pacific Island community in New Zealand and around the world. Project that actually launched this week, which you, has anybody heard of this one? Whew. This is in association with stuff, basically. And this is a nice example of a transmedia project. It's got a central thread, which is the story of these two characters. And they travel from Invercargill to run up to Cape Rihanga. So the story is they have to drive a car up the country. That's the central thread. There's their relationship and the dynamic between these two. But she is a Canadian journalism student. And her desire on this road trip is to find stories of interesting New Zealanders and sort of find out more about New Zealand and its characters. So through stuff, they ran a car, not a competition, but asked readers to submit ideas. What ideas? Who should we go and visit? Tell us, who should we see what stories are interesting around New Zealand? And they got hundreds of things submitted. They then asked people to vote on the best ideas. They narrowed it down. And they've chosen nine different locations around New Zealand on the course of this road trip. So they've woven the interviews with these various characters. So for example, there is a yesterday's episode had this quite out there kind of burlesque performance show thing happening in Christchurch. And the characters in the character of them being on the road trip went and interviewed the person doing the show, went to the show, talked about the show. It's kind of woven into their narrative as they go up. And then today's episode, we'll have somebody in architecture tomorrow's episode, somebody else. So they're sort of weaving these different stories. Plus, there were radio interviews. There's a whole lot of back stories. They can only take little pieces in the actual web episode. So on Tumblr, there's a whole back story, the full sort of burlesque performance and the extra links to all the information. And the interviews is all happening on Tumblr. And there are pictures of the thing on Instagram. There are quite a lot of interactions still happening with this on social media as well. And it's sort of also bringing the communities, as they've passed through these communities and told these stories, they're getting all those people involved in the community access radio people, have done interviews, they're talking about it, the ones that they've interviewed are talking about it. It's got some quite nice little elements to it. If you have a look on stuff, it's actually an episode a day for this week and next week. Has anybody heard of this one? This is an international example. This is a really nice project. So this was created by somebody who wanted to honor Johnny Cash. And the music video for this song, Ain't No Grave, all each of the frames of the music video were made available online. And you could download one of the frames and you could colorize it or design it or tailor it, however you want it to do. You recorded a little video of yourself with your story about why Johnny Cash is important to you, what he's meant in your life or why you love that song. And you uploaded your frame, plus your little video and your little bio of yourself. And this site, when you watch the video, it compiles randomly a frame, each one of those frames, from all of the millions of frames that were submitted from everybody. So each time you watch the video, you get a different sequence of the frames of the video. And you can stop it at any point, click on a frame and go and see who submitted that one and why Johnny Cash was important to them. And I haven't included all of these to run to show you because it would take too long, but this one is actually really cool to go and watch. And it's amazing that every time you get a different experience, when you stop the video, you can see the list of the 50 different versions of that particular frame. You can click on any one of them and see why anybody's chosen that one and what they've done with it. Another TransMedia project is quite a classic one that's been around a few years now. And I heard about this from Jeff Gomez, who's a TransMedia producer from the States that came to New Zealand and ran a workshop recently. And Lizzie Bennett Diaries is a multi-platform adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. And it reimagines this Jane Austen classic as a blog filmed in the bedroom of a 24-year-old student. There are over 100 YouTube episodes and there are a number of additional videos where characters are engaging with questions or answering questions from different people who've submitted comments or have questions and interviews. The side characters in this have had spin-off video blogs and blogs of their own sort of like stories as well. So there's a whole connected network of stories and blogs associated with it. And the producers ran a Kickstarter campaign to make a few more episodes and actually to create DVDs of the series. And they reached their goal within six hours and the money just kept coming in. And the people submitting were saying, use the money, make more episodes. We want more of this. We love this so much, you just keep making more of it. And ironically, it's now actually a book. So it's kind of come full circle. But I mean, that's a really lovely example of something transmedia. So why do this? Why would you bother? I think aside from the possibilities that you get and the exciting opportunities that the internet in particular gives us to extend a project, it's about moving with the times and reference back to the pictures at the beginning of the way that people behave. Audiences actually expect there to be more these days. They want to be able to access or watch content whenever and wherever they like. They want to be able to talk about it. They might even feel like they're entitled to influence it. They like to choose the device that they have. They like to choose their degree of engagement, if you like. And they expect responsiveness. So you kind of got to be there. You've got to do what people want you to do if you want the people. Also, it opens up new opportunities for producers to get direct involvement and even direction from audiences. And some of the interactions that producers get are quite unexpected. And they can take stories in ways that they hadn't anticipated. So there's an element of wonder or opportunity and delight in there that can come from not knowing what's going to happen. Creatives get to try new things. There's a sort of new forms of artistic expression. You can relatively low risk try something out. You can take it in whatever direction you want. You can bring it back and stop it if it doesn't work. You can break the sort of established frameworks that change definitions of the way things should work. So it's kind of a limitless possibility at the same time bound by your budget, bound by audience interaction and bound by, you know, choosing something that's right for the story that you have. But being everywhere means newer and bigger audiences as well. And you have the opportunity to have an audience on one platform and take them with you to the next one, to be everywhere. There are opportunities for new business models as well, more platforms, bigger audiences, more potential. I won't deny that there is actually no tried and true way of making money off these things. It's a little bit, it's not so much hit and miss. Great things will be successful and sometimes great things won't be if they don't find their audiences. That's because finding audiences is the biggest challenge of any of these online things. So loyal audiences that you take with you also talk about you, also share your messages, also bring people and their friends and their contacts into the things that you're doing. I want to close actually with this vaguely related story. This is a TED talk and this is a Nigerian author, a novelist and I won't try and pronounce her name. But she has this amazing talk about the danger of a single story. She talks about growing up in Nigeria in a, you know, reasonably, not like a middle class Nigerian family where she had, where she read about, she read books that were by British and American authors and so her experience of literature and her experience of the world that books gave her was of talking about white children drinking ginger beer, talking about the weather and having this whole set of kind of experiences that meant nothing to her. So in her head, this was what white people were, this is what, this is a world that existed only in literature. When she later discovered African writers and discovered sort of alternative views that she found her culture reflected in that literature and she found a way to express her sort of authentic cultural voice. And in this talk, she highlights several examples in her life where just having one perspective really limits your ability to see the potential of the world and to see opportunities. I recommend you watch this talk. It's got kind of nothing to do with transmedia but the idea is that transmedia allows you to progress beyond a single story and to see different points of view and to explore different perspectives or aspects. It's quite a new world, it's quite exciting, it's quite relevant and I suggest you get out there and do it. That's me. Five minutes for questions. Suck that much, huh? Transmedia accessing different stories from around the slide that you finished on. In the context of content that's being created, do you think that people are engaging cross-culturally more? Or is it actually that content's being created specifically for smaller cultural groups and other people accessing it? It's not actually, you know, are New Zealand children accessing Nigerian content, for example? Do you think that the world will go that way or are we still actually looking for our own stories? I think that the fact that these things are online means that the possibility for everyone to access them is enhanced. But say, for example, with the Pacific Island features that we funded recently, our goal was to get content that was relevant and, you know, useful or of interest to Pacific Islanders. There was a big sort of peripheral audience around that that saw things that they hadn't seen before. Nobody had seen a drama comedy series entirely made up of Pacific Island characters. And even Pacific Islanders watching it were going like, oh my God, everybody's brown and there's no drugs and there's no cops. Like it was a lovely, great story, yeah. And that is an opportunity to share those kind of like the wonderful stories and the breadth of stories with different cultures. But I honestly don't know, other than I think the internet makes it possible. Thank you for that. I was just wondering from New Zealand's perspective, whether there's any kind of minimum threshold of the on-the-air component to the interest in trans media. So for example, there was a very site-specific community-oriented project that did have an online element or a video element. Do you think they considered kind of fun to go as it's that or? Yeah, no, the digital fund is completely not bound by broadcast. It doesn't need to have a broadcast outcome. Digital. Yeah, and there are certainly, it could also be in real life, is there anything there? There's sort of an interesting crossover from theater or performance art into digital. There does have to be a digital element and we need to, there's sort of an area where is this Creative New Zealand's business or is this NZ On Air's business or is this, you know, like there's a little bit of a gray area around that, but we certainly, as long as it all comes together in a good way, it's something that gets considered. Yeah. Hi, I was wondering what you, when you talk about trans media, are you mainly thinking of things that are initiated from a center like a TV show that then sets up side projects that are interactive with it? And to what extent trans media also involves a periphery which you have unauthorized? I think it's something like fan fiction, that sort of thing online, that it's a case of people being prepared to open up their project and let other people do things with it. I actually think that what really happens because primarily of financial constraints, in an ideal scenario, the Trans Media Project is not started with a broadcast, a TV series or a film or something like that. In an ideal world, it starts with an idea, a story world, and all the different producers sit at the table and they say, where are all our, you know, how are our different projects gonna come together and where do they intersect? There may or may not be a series component to it or a documentary or a film. It could certainly be something that somebody is opening up like you say in shaping in a different direction. But what I've realized is that every single project is going to handle this slightly differently and going to come together very differently, but what everybody really needs is the core of a really good idea and needs to understand how their audiences are going to find it and where their audiences are and that's actually the two biggest and most important things. I hope we're being on time. Thanks. Thanks to your questions. Thanks, you're amazing. Thank you.