Commenting on Henry Jenkins "The Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: Principles of Transmedia Storytelling."

Henry Jenkins, is often seen as the pioneer of transmedia, if not it's pioneer then at least one of it's most staunch and well known advocates. He has often held the belief that if a story is strong enough then it is are often greatly enhanced by telling across a range of different media, be it comic books, animation, novels or film.

One of the points he spoke on in the blog was seriality. This intrigued me as where does seriality end and transmedia begin if they use different forms. Can something be considered one continual story if it begins life as an animation and ends as a novel? Indeed can it work?

Jenkins describes seriality in media as "A serial, then, creates meaningful and compelling story chunks and then disperses the full story across multiple installments" It is interesting to think then if a franchise was created as a film and ended in a cliffhanger which would be concluded in a comic book which ended in a cliffhanger which is concluded in a novel. In theory the concept would work but not on as large a level at least financially as a purely movie-based franchise would. There would be an audience which would be loyal enough to a story which would follow the cross-media jump for instance the TV show 'Buffy the vampire slayer' created by Joss Whedon ended at season seven when a large chunk of the city was swallowed into hell and thousands of people became slayers as well, a few years later Joss Whedon wrote 'Buffy the Vampire slayer: Season 8' comic book which continued from that point in the story and the comic continues to do well.

However this is perhaps almost incidental as a lot of the comic book's patrons were already comic-book fans, so it's hard to say if the crossover would work if it was only continued in one form at a time.

As Jenkins writes "There still is a lot we don't know about what will motivate consumers to seek out those other bits of information about the unfolding story" and it will perhaps only be proved successful if a company is daring enough to be the pathfinder and take the risk on a transmedia serial. An interesting way to approach a possibility of creating a expansive universe via seriality would be in the same way that films such as 2004's 'Crash' and to a lesser extent 2009's 'Crossing Over', where separate stories with separate characters begin to interweave. This would be interesting to see if this would work via transmedia; for instance one story in comic book, one animation, one digital game and one film all begin to affect each other and the stories interweave.
This is something that I would like to see happen more in digital games in the future and I think the realms of comic book, cinema, animation and TV are closely enough linked to allow the transition to be successful if done well.