"Fish Where the Fish Are" (Video w/ Tim Kring & Reif Larsen)
Last month, I had the chance to host a session with "Heroes" creator Tim Kring and author/artist Reif Larsen at the first annual Boston Book Festival.
Larsen's talk was hilarious; Kring spoke about the origins and essence of transmedia storytelling (although he also spent a bit too much time for my taste screening "Heroes" promos).
The message that stuck with me from this session was that if you want to be a storyteller, rather than struggling to get people to come to you (on whatever medium/distribution platform you've chosen to use), why not take your story to where the audience is? "Fish where the fish are," Kring says. That may mean bringing your message to cell phones, video games, embedded Web videos, whatever. You may be surprised at the artistic and economic sparks that fly in those different media.
The video is now up.
At the 45-minute mark, we talk about attention. I suggest the game that all storytellers are playing is about winning peoples' attention.
"Our greatest asset is our sustained attention," Larsen said, quoting Ken Burns (who had done a session earlier in the day that I missed.) "That's the asset that is quickly disappearing."
Larsen's talk was hilarious; Kring spoke about the origins and essence of transmedia storytelling (although he also spent a bit too much time for my taste screening "Heroes" promos).
The message that stuck with me from this session was that if you want to be a storyteller, rather than struggling to get people to come to you (on whatever medium/distribution platform you've chosen to use), why not take your story to where the audience is? "Fish where the fish are," Kring says. That may mean bringing your message to cell phones, video games, embedded Web videos, whatever. You may be surprised at the artistic and economic sparks that fly in those different media.
The video is now up.
At the 45-minute mark, we talk about attention. I suggest the game that all storytellers are playing is about winning peoples' attention.
"Our greatest asset is our sustained attention," Larsen said, quoting Ken Burns (who had done a session earlier in the day that I missed.) "That's the asset that is quickly disappearing."
Labels: books, Boston Book Festival, Heroes, Reif Larsen, Tim Kring, transmedia
posted by Scott Kirsner at
2:29 PM
1 Comments:
Another aspect of "fishing where the fish are" that many overlook is subject matter/setting.
You will have an easier time finding an audience for your story if its set in a world that already has lots of fans. I'm not talking about fan fiction per se but something along those lines...
A story set in the world of amateur soccer, yoga classes, zydeco music scene... there are already fans gathered in online communities based around these subjects and a fiction film could get a lot of attention fast.
By
Julian Perrera, at 6:58 PM
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