Storysharers
The Berlinale Talent Campus discusses cross-media strategies updating some old McLuhan's bits of wisdom.
The "Indie Filmmaker's Guide to Cross Media" panel
Michal Reilhac of ARTE France Cinéma set the tone of the first “Indie Filmmaker’s Guide“ discussion on cross media by quoting a Swiss cartoonist, who recently claimed that the old McLuhan adage “Medium is the message” has morphed into “medium is a mess”. In that, he implied both the incoherence of the current media environment and the spirit of wild adventure pervading it.
According to Reilhac, the “naïve fascination of the new” regarding the Internet is now slowly petering out. We are entering a new stage, which will be defined by the growing self-awareness of the users. To tell stories across multi-platform media, one needs to engage with them in a variety of ways that can enhance individual participation, risk-taking and emotional response to the material.
The vastly experienced cross-media storyteller from Sweden, Martin Elricsson, gave a highly entertaining speech that involved presenting a groundbreaking project he was involved in, THE TRUTH ABOUT MARIKA, which can be seen in retrospect as a cornerstone of multi-platform viewer engagement (among other things, it invited the audience to take part in a series of urban scavenger hunts).
Some much-needed reality principles were then provided by Caspar Sonnen, who focused on the possibilities of documentary storytelling that would utilize cross media imaginatively. By pointing to an online project GAZA SDEROT, reporting on daily life in Israel and Palestine in a split-screen fashion, and calling it “the CITIZEN KANE of cross media”, Sonnen suggested that Internet is “the most creative canvas for documentaries ever”.
At the end of the day, as every participant duly pointed out, it’s all about telling one’s story in a coherent, engaging way. The key difference between then and now was best summed up by Elricsson, who suggested that participation in storytelling can currently amount to producing new content as much as to receiving the pre-existing one. We are less and less tuned into a purely receptive mode of taking things in – cross media enables the users to redefine the work even as they’re enjoying it and letting it stimulate their imaginations.
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