 We asked Rebecca Ahlen to sum up the most exciting developments in serial storytelling she has observed during the last years. The most exciting developments on especially on what you call new media content, which is not a good term anyway, what makes this topic so interesting is that it changes whenever you talk about it, so I can have this talk today and I'm going to have this talk next week and it's going to be a different one. A couple of years ago the first Transmedia show came or the first one I saw in the way as a series was Truth About Marika, which was a Swedish Transmedia project about a woman going missing and a lot of people sort of having to be involved and the viewer especially having to be involved in finding her and you can go across a wide spectrum of media looking for her. And I thought it was fascinating and everyone believed it to be the future and sadly it was not so. I mean there have been a couple of successful Transmedia projects, for example in Germany in the last couple of years, Dina Fox and some other ones around the globe. You really have this opportunity to tell over wide number of a multimedia access point and you think that you can sort of make a multi-platform story yet no one uses it because it's so much harder and so much more, it creates so much more energy than just sitting down and watching a good series. There's lots to learn and how to make this whole experience more rewarding especially if you're a hardcore or a medium core fan. However, I don't think that it's something that's going to evolve over the years into like a big massive genre that everyone's going to use. It's going to be niche, which is good, I like niche. Then the whole short stories, these online short stories which sort of showed boldness and storytelling being really quick and really sassy and telling different stories than you would originally see on TV, which was really fascinating for everyone and TV was really really boring and old school and heavy and here you had something that was brave and bold and new. But now it also has changed because TV has become much bolder due to all these inventions, all these new modern ways of storytelling that have become popular especially through American cable TV and Danish TV etc. Then you have something like Berlin Tag und Nacht, Berlin Day and Night, which is a soft scripted fictional daily drama that relies very heavily on a fictional Facebook site where all the characters exist and write to their audience and it's sort of a game and it's been hugely popular especially among young people where you can sort of tell stories, talk to each other, tell, give sneak peeks etc. But still always in a fictional context. So if you watch the TV series and spend time on Facebook you get sort of the full picture and you see things that other people wouldn't see so it's sort of transmedia light and transmedia mainstream which shows you that it still works. So I thought that was also very fascinating sort of moving towards that which is a lot less complicated because you only have to watch TV and be on Facebook which is nearly what everyone does anyway so a lot of people do it. But that's one way to deal with this whole transmedia storytelling but for a mainstream audience way. And then my absolute favorite one is having something like a classic non TV broadcaster such as Netflix producing really, really, really good, really classic TV. And I think that shows how the whole structure is moving and how bold everyone's becoming and sort of storytelling you don't have a broadcaster that's as limiting anymore. You do have a broadcaster that's still as limiting but there are broadcasters out there that aren't as limiting that are putting a good story in focus that are trusting people etc. with the creative process and giving that into their hands and I think House of Cards is a fantastic example of that. So it's really moving that way and I think we're moving much more closer together. I think that's if you combine all of that that I've just said which is a lot. It's sort of showing how TV and an online world are sort of zoning in on each other and as sooner or later they're going to be one and it's going to be one way to tell a story and that's what's exciting. As transmedia storytelling, the telling of stories across several media platforms plays an important role in the current development of storytelling. We have saved two of the upcoming chapters to this matter. What Rebecca Ahn called Transmedia Light, a TV series being accompanied by real Facebook profiles for its rather fictional characters has been done several times since social networks exist. This course and this chapter obviously focus heavily on audiovisual media. Everybody who's enrolled in this course and owns a smartphone or any digital camera and an internet access can create a video today and upload it to a video platform like YouTube, Bimeo or else. Everybody can be an audiovisual storyteller today. Let's leave the video and film sector for a second though and look at what other possibilities we are offered to use for free to tell our stories on the web. One central web storytelling device is the blog or with it blog fiction. For example, fictional diaries like Belle des Jours, Belle des Jours, Diary of a London Call Girl or Diablo Cody's The Pussy Ranch blog. Now look at social networks, at Twitter, at Facebook, at blogs. Those are perfect platforms that are already used to tell all kinds of stories, serial or not, be it reality based or completely fictional. If you are interested in Twitter storytelling, stories told in tweets in 140 characters, go visit the Guardian UK website and have a peek at famous authors telling a story in 140 characters. Or visit the New Yorker Twitter channel and wire fiction for Pulitzer Prize winning Jennifer Egan's serialized Twitter story experiment, Black Box. Black Box is thoroughly told in pieces of 140 character tweets, but it's a whole story, so it's more tweets than just one like on the Guardian website. Another example of web storytelling using social media would be in 2012 German ad agency Jung von Mutt and the Berlin Gorky Theatre staged the first live play of Theodor Fontane, Theodor Fontaine's classic play Effie Breeze. All characters of the play owned their own Facebook profiles and communicated on the theatre profile page via text and a video and pictures and likes. A video documenting the event and the posts itself can be seen on the Gorky Theatre's Facebook account. Effie Breeze on Facebook was a pre-designed and very well rehearsed and produced project, a one-off event. However, no theatre or agency is needed to tell stories via Facebook or other social networks. So, welcome to our creative task of the week! Last week we have dealt with character profiles for serial characters that already exist. This week we built on exactly this task by using your knowledge about how a fictional character is formed to create a new fictional one. This character can be entirely your own creation, for example created for a story you've already written or a character that you are just creating or a character that you are just creating or if that's too difficult you can vaguely base it on a classic fictional character from Lady Macbeth to Sherlock Holmes. It doesn't matter as long as the character is unique and yours with its own original name. Which also means please refrain from creating fake profiles for a friend of yours or any celebrity. First of all it's illegal and secondly because this task is like all creative tasks given to you and meant for you as a training tool and only you. No matter whether this character you create has a Facebook profile, a LinkedIn profile, a blogspot or WordPress blog with a fictional CV on it, a diary entry or else. Make sure you find a freely accessible online site and use it to make this fictional character breathe while giving him or her an online life. Have fun!