By Daniel Faris.
As with many of my favorite movies, books, shows, or musicians, I have a friend to thank for introducing me to the wonder of web series. Catching up with a fellow alumni not long after our graduation from college, our mutual nostalgia prompted an introduction to my first web series: Dorm Life.
Dorm Life is a two season mockumentary that chronicles the adventures that take place on a freshman floor (5 South). Although primarily a comedy, the series does not shy away from the emotional depth of the characters, using a mix of personal webcam confessionals and footage captured by the (mostly) unseen documentary crew to explore both individual characters and floor relationships.
After binge-watching Dorm Life with greater dedication than I ever showed a college exam, my next web series fix came via The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is, if you couldn’t guess, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice told via grad student Lizzie Bennet’s video blog. The series modernizes the plot of the novel and supplements the original text by devoting a large portion of screen time to Lizzie’s relationships with her sisters, Jane and Lydia, and her best friend, Charlotte Lu. Consistently framed with Lizzie (and guests) seated in front of, and often speaking directly to, the camera, the audience can truly feel that Lizzie is interacting with them directly.
Although I love both of these series for their individual styles, it’s the idea of a transmedia experience that has me most excited about this emerging medium.
Transmedia and Web Series
Although my personal level of transmedia immersion varied from show to show, my excitement and hope for the practice holds quite steady.
For both the aforementioned shows, characters don’t merely exist in the YouTube vlogs. Instead, they also interact with each other and with fans via a variety of social media platforms. Many of the characters have Twitter accounts that provide “real time” interactions between the characters between episodes. The comparatively older Dorm Life utilized MySpace. Lizzie’s sister Jane had a Lookbook and Pinterest account to support her interest in a career in the fashion industry.
Furthermore, the series provided additional videos to supplement the main narrative. Dorm Life’s residents uploaded their own videos separate from the official episodes. The Lizzie Bennet Diaries developed separate channels for Lydia Bennet, Maria Lu, and Gigi Darcy over the course of the series.
The brilliance of these transmedia efforts is the customizable engagement the fans can have with the series. For Dorm Life, I finished the main narrative videos before I discovered the supplemental videos and transmedia accounts. At the other end of the spectrum, I immersed myself completely in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries experience, watching every video (Lizzie’s, Lydia’s, Gigi’s, etc) as they aired, following characters on every platform so I wouldn’t miss a moment of the unfolding story.
Regardless of my level of engagement, I could still understand the plot. If I only followed the main channel or vlogger, I still experienced the bulk of the story. If I jumped headfirst into the transmedia, my experience was uniquely enhanced.
In any event, my experience for each series was vastly different. Binge-watching Dorm Life with no knowledge of its transmedia efforts made the experience much the same as discovering and barreling through a TV series on Netflix. With The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, however, I was swept up in a completely new way. Following the videos and transmedia as it unfolded week to week in “real time” both heightened the tension and helped soften the lines between fiction and reality.
If nothing else, unconsciously living in these other worlds throughout the day helped me pass the time at my day job as a house painter.
The Future
My hopes for the future of web series and their transmedia efforts are high. Since completing The Lizzie Bennet Diaries I have stumbled into the transmedia worlds of The Autobiography of Jane Eyre and The New Adventures of Peter and Wendy, among others. Passionate, talented storytellers who came together within The Lizzie Bennet Diaries fandom are now launching Cracked Slate Productions, an entirely volunteer-based endeavor seeking to explore the possibilities of transformative and transmedia storytelling. I eagerly await their debut project.
Web series and transmedia efforts have opened up new avenues for viewer engagement and storytelling techniques alike. As the medium grows in popularity and experience, I anticipate further innovations and experimentation, especially as more and more productions emerge from talented newcomers and collaborating fans.
With hope comes fear, however, and the fear for every new medium is whether Hollywood studios and other money-focused juggernauts will seek to exploit the profitability of the medium at the expense of its creativity.
Perhaps that fear is a bit too negative and assumes a bit too much of the worst. I can only hope that the genre continues to defy traditional storytelling methods and pursues further innovation while avoiding corporate shackles and authorial pitfalls.
About the Author:
Daniel Faris graduated from the Writers Institute at Susquehanna University in 2011; since then he’s worked as a freelance writer and blogger, covering anything and everything to do with music and pop culture.
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