With the Erasmus+ project ‘Mediascapes. Transmedia digital Storytelling for audiovisual and media literacy skills’, we want to open a window on Transmedia Storytelling in order to shed light on this powerful form of communication and effective teaching methodology.
Our first objective was to carry out a methodological research that could be a point of reference for young people, students, teachers, researchers, trainers and all those interested in understanding the practice of Transmedia Storytelling. As well as relying on diverse texts and essays as traditional bibliographic support, we also decided to carry out ‘field research’, i.e. interviewing teachers, researchers and professional storytellers who shared valuable first-hand experiences and insights.
Our first interview was with Ms. Simona Tirocchi, Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences of the University of Turin. She coordinated the Italian unit of the project TRANSMEDIA LITERACY. Exploiting transmedia skills and informal learning strategies to improve formal education funded under the Horizon 2020 programme.
An interesting moment of the interview was trying to identify 3 keywords that could define Transmedia Storytelling. The ones that the professor chose are:
- STORY: The significance of the story and self-narrative in storytelling, revealing the identity, needs, expectations, and preferences of users.
- MULTIMODALITY: The importance of using various communicative modes and representations in storytelling, especially in today’s multimedia landscape in which different forms of expression compose different content disseminated through different platforms.
- CREATIVITY: Creating transmedia storytelling requires creative ideas and the ability to express oneself creatively across different media formats.
The second person interviewed was Mr. Enrico Granzotto, specialized in storytelling and immersive projects, some of which also involve Transmedia Storytelling. With him we wanted to discuss the benefits of transmedia storytelling in learning processes. An important aspect discussed was the fact that it’s the combination of several media that enables a powerful acquisition of knowledge, a process that articulates between textual content and audiovisual products, between narratives that can be listened to and others that can be experienced first-hand through virtual reality. To say it with his words, being able to interact in a hybrid manner between cinema, video games, virtual reality, television series, but also literature, leads to relating to different communication systems, which are pervasive, plural, in the contemporary mediasphere. In this way, users are able to explore different modes of communication but also different tools for acquiring knowledge, as knowing and relating to different digital and analogue tools offers further ways for accessing knowledge.