 Welcome and welcome to our seventh week of the future of storytelling. We've already come a long way, from the basic introductions to classical storytelling and a peek at its origins, like in chapter 1, to discussing formats, theories and tools in literature, film, games and digital media. As I said in the first chapter of this course, nobody knows what the future will hold. Nobody, really unfortunately nobody today can know for sure what developments lie ahead of us. However, we can very well analyze the changes in storytelling up to its current state, or various states as we have seen. One of the biggest trends in recent years is definitely about mixing and joining different genres, different whatever. Firstly, that means mixing content, creating hybrids of different genres, as I said, franchises or like with Joss Whedon's movie Avengers, different superheroes. But this trend of mixing also refers to the media and the tools involved to create. That's why we want to focus our last two chapters on one of the major buzzwords, really hype words in storytelling right now, transmedia storytelling. Whether you are a writer, create or analyze games, movies, series, websites or novels or whatever, you most definitely have been in contact with transmedia in one way or another, whether you've known it or not actually. We asked Robert Pratton, CEO of Conductor and Transmedia Storytelling Consultant basically, to define transmedia storytelling for us. Transmedia storytelling is telling a story across multiple platforms and doing it in a way that the whole experience is greater than the sum of the parts. So if we look at what Hollywood would use to put out as a kind of franchise, they would option a book and then from that they would write a screenplay and go shoot a movie. And often what would happen is that people who read the book would be disappointed by the movie because it didn't really expand their knowledge, it didn't really introduce anything new for them and it was always a disappointment. And we saw the same when Hollywood decided that they would franchise out movies into games and so often these games were like really poor imitations of the movie experience. And the thinking behind transmedia storytelling is not to adapt the story but to tell something new. And so we think of these individual stories as being part of a larger story world and now what we find with things like Assassin's Creed or Star Wars for example, each of the movies tells a different sort of chapter in that bigger universe. If you look at Star Wars they've got all kinds of different things now from games to online games and so on. And each platform basically gives us a new insight into this bigger world. In his talks and his book Getting Started in Transmedia Storytelling, Robert Cretton differentiates between several types and dimensions of transmedia storytelling that we can use to analyze and define transmedia narratives. When I first started explaining transmedia to people in different types of transmedia, I tried to do it in relation to something they might be already familiar with. So because people are more familiar with franchises, the idea that there's a prequel and then the main event and then there's a sequel. What you can see in transmedia is that rather than maybe like they're all like a trilogy of books, instead of writing the first book we make that a web series and then instead of doing that sequel maybe we turn that into a game. And what would make that transmedia rather than just a regular franchise would be that the experience of the audience as they move from web series to movie to game is one of increasing satisfaction because they're learning something more and it's giving them deeper insights. But there's a different type of transmedia, one that takes one particular story and tries to expand it across platforms. And an example of that would be an alternate reality game. So with an alternate reality game you might say I've got a story and then break that story into scenes or into beats and then take those individual scenes and put them onto different platforms. So you might have a scene that's told on a blog or you might have a scene that's told in the street in a poster somewhere that you have to visit in your neighborhood. So that was like an introduction, one way of seeing transmedia has been different. And then I developed this radar diagram that tried to think more clearly about different types of formats. Transmedia is such a big umbrella and there's people doing lots of different experiments, they're trying different things. And I tried to look at what was out there and classify them. So we see that some transmedia tends more towards just the storytelling than it does puzzle solving. So one sort of access you might say is how much of a story is being told directly from the author and how much is the story expected to be discovered through exploration, through solving puzzles. And then another two dimensions would be how much of it is set in the real world versus how much is set in a virtual world or online somewhere. And then the fourth dimension was how much participation or how much co-creation is allowed or expected. So can the audience through their participation change the story? Can they expand it? And we see on Wikipedia or Wikimedia there's some quite big story worlds now which have come to be known as shared story worlds where the author will start with basically some ground rules, they'll start with a foundation for this story world. And then they've invited the audience to come in and write their own content. And I think that's quite exciting and I think we're going to see quite a lot more of that.