Contemporary culture is packed with fantasy and science fiction storyworlds extending across multiple media platforms. This book explores the myriad ways in which imaginary worlds use media like films, novels, videogames, comic books, toys and increasingly user-generated content to captivate and energise contemporary audiences.

Contemporary culture is packed with fantasy and science fiction storyworlds extending across multiple media platforms. This book explores the myriad ways in which imaginary worlds use media like films, novels, videogames, comic books, toys and increasingly user-generated content to captivate and energise contemporary audiences.

Don’t restrict your creative property to one media channel. Make the essential leap to transmedia! From film to television to games and beyond, Storytelling Across Worlds gives you the tools to weave a narrative universe across multiple platforms and meet the insatiable demand of today’s audience for its favorite creative property. This, the first primer in the field for both producers and writers, teaches you how to: * Employ film, television, games, novels, comics, and the web to build rich and immersive transmedia narratives * Create writing and production bibles for transmedia property * Monetize your stories across separate media channels * Manage transmedia brands, marketing, and rights * Work effectively with writers and producers in different areas of production * Engage audiences with transmedia storytelling Up-to-date examples of current transmedia and cross-media properties accompany each chapter and highlight this hot but sure-to-be enduring topic in modern media.

This book confronts the question of why our culture is so fascinated by the apocalypse. It ultimately argues that while many see the post-apocalyptic genre as reflective of contemporary fears, it has actually co-evolved with the transformations in our mediascape to become a perfect vehicle for transmedia storytelling. The post-apocalyptic offers audiences a portal to a fantasy world that is at once strange and familiar, offers a high degree of internal consistency and completeness, and allows for a diversity of stories by different creative teams in the same story world. With case studies of franchises such as The Walking Dead and The Terminator, Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse offers analyses of how shifts in media industries and reception cultures have promoted a new kind of open, world-building narrative across film, television, video games, and print. For transmedia scholars and fans of the genre, this book shows how the end of the world is really just the beginning...

This book brings genre back to the forefront of the current transmedia trend. Genres are perhaps the most innately transmedial of media constructs, formed as they are from all kinds of industrial, technological and discursive phenomena. Yet, few have considered how genre works in a multiplatform context. This book does precisely that, making a uniquely transmedial contribution to the study of genre in the age of media convergence. The book interrogates how industrial, technological and participatory transformations of digital platforms and emerging technologies reshape workings of genre. The authors consider franchises such as Star Wars, streaming platforms such as Netflix, catch-up services such as ITV Hub, creative technologies such as virtual reality, and beyond. In setting the stage for the revival of genre theory in contemporary transmedia scholarship, this book pushes forward understandings of multiplatform media and the emerging form and function of genre across contemporary culture.

Introduction: Seeing past the state of the art -- That which survives: design networks and blueprint culture between fandom and franchise -- Used universes and immaculate realities: appropriation and authorship in the age of previz -- Chains of evidence: augmented performance before and after the digital -- Microgenres in migration: special effects and transmedia travel -- Conclusion: The effects of special effects.

From J.R.R. Tolkien to Star Trek and from Game of Thrones to Battlestar Galactica and from The Walking Dead to Janelle Mone's Afrofuturist concept albums, transmedia world building offer us complex and immersive environments beyond capitalism. Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics examines the ways in which these popular storyworlds offer tools for anticapitalist theory and practice. Building on Hardt and Negir's theory of global capitalism. Dan Hassler-Forest shows how transmedia world-building has the potential to offer more than a momentary escape from capitalist realism in the age of media a converagence and participator culture. This book feature eight fantastic storyworlds that offer vivid illustration of global capitalism contradictory logic. Approaching transmedia world-building both as a cultural form and as a political economy, Hassler-Forest demonstrates the limitations inherent in fandom and fan culture, which is increasingly absorbed as a form of immaterial labor. At the same time, he also explores the productive ways in which fantastic storyworlds contain a radical energy that can give us new ways of thinking about politics popular culture and anticapitalism.