The latest in our series of exclusive Lizzie Bennet Diaries interviews – Hypable spoke to The LBD Transmedia Producer Jay Bushman about his recent Streamys win, his work on the show, and what transmedia is all about, anyway.
It’s been Lizzie Bennet Diaries mania here on Hypable. Last week we brought you the first in our series of interviews, with the stars of the show:
Now it’s time to look behind the scenes at one of the most innovative and interactive elements of this Pride and Prejudice adaptation – the use of transmedia. So what is transmedia all about? We decided to go straight to the source – to Jay Bushman, Transmedia Producer on The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.
Hypable’s Exclusive interview with Jay Bushman
Hypable: First, congratulations on your early win at The Streamy Awards. The Lizzie Bennet Diaries won Best Interactive Program, how does that feel?
Jay Bushman: The Streamy Award, along with the IAWTV [for Best Interactive/Social Media Experience] award last month, is hugely gratifying. Especially since I’ve spent – and still spend – a lot of time trying to convince skeptical producers and executives that this kind of storytelling is workable, powerful, engaging and worth the effort. So this kind of validation from the community is incredible and humbling. And I hope it’s a sign that more people will want to explore this kind of storytelling in the future.
It’s also nice because now I can relax during the actual ceremony and cheer on the rest of the team nominated in the other categories.
[Authors note: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries also picked up the Streamy for Best Writing: Comedy (for Bernie Su)]
What is your definition of ‘transmedia’?
Alas, that’s actually a really complicated subject. We have a joke – put two transmedia creators in a room and pretty soon they’ll have three definitions of transmedia. But the short version is “telling stories over multiple platforms.” The term encompasses many different variations on that.
The two big ones are: 1) multiple standalone stories on multiple types of media that all are connected to the same storyworld – Star Wars or The Matrix are good examples of that, and 2) telling a single cohesive story over several different channels, which is the style of transmedia that we use. These two different branches of transmedia have a lot in common, but they also face unique and separate challenges, which is one of the things that I think leads to the term being so confusing.
I tend to fall into the second category; I’m mainly interested in single stories that come at you from multiple directions. I also find the term “transmedia” to be inherently limiting – it implies value in the simple number of different platforms that get used, rather than the unique story qualities of moving a story around over a number of digital channels. It leads to checklist thinking, that in order to have a “real transmedia” project, there’s some threshold of number of platforms that have to be used.
I fully expect the term transmedia to be superseded at some point by something else. We just don’t have that term yet. But in the future, I think we’ll look back at the word as something like “kinescope” or “zoetrope” – an archaic term used for a short period of time as an evolutionary step towards something much bigger.
But for now, transmedia is the term we have, and it’s the way I describe what I do so I can get hired for work.
How did you become involved with The Lizzie Bennet Diaries? Whose idea was it to include all of the transmedia elements?
I’ve known Bernie [Su, co-creator, executive producer, head writer and director] for several years, and we’d been looking for a way to work together. Back in 2011, I saw him at the first Storyworld Conference – a convention for transmedia and multi-platform storytellers – and he told me that it gave him a bunch of ideas. I had already been developing a modern take on Pride and Prejudice, but had stalled a bit on cracking the adaptation and had put it aside.
Early in 2012, when a mutual friend found out that Bernie was doing LBD and wanted to add some transmedia elements, she suggested that he reach out to me. Bernie gave me the rundown on the concept, and I jumped at the chance to join the team. It was a perfect fit.
Who decides which storylines are included on the various social media platforms you use?
Everything starts in the writer’s room. We break the stories for each arc, and decide what belongs on camera and what doesn’t. For major story beats, I’ll look at what ends up in the episodes and try to find ways that transmedia can complement the action, show viewers what’s going on from a different perspective of characters who don’t belong on camera at that point, or ways to bridge episodes together. I’ll discuss ideas with Alex [Edwards, transmedia editor] and Bernie and we’ll decide on a course of action.
For some of the other transmedia elements, individual people have a certain amount of autonomy to decide what to do in the moment. Rachel [Kiley, writer for The LBD and spinoff The Lydia Bennet] does a fantastic job with Lydia’s tweets and her choices of which to mark as favorites. Alex has control of Gigi’s music choices, and has used them to tell a great story about that character’s evolution, even before she ever appeared on screen. I had the idea for Caroline’s Thanksgiving ordeal the night before, and I wrote it on the spot.
This is something I have always wondered – are the favorited tweets on each twitter account ‘in character’? Is the character favoriting them, or are they chosen simply to reflect the kinds of conversations happening in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries fandom?
That’s the character favoriting them as a marker of her state of mind. And I love seeing the conversations about what a character marking a post as a favorite means. There a term that’s used in transmedia that has its roots in alternate reality games called “story archeology.” It’s the idea that the audience picks up these little bits of information about what’s going on and from those clues they assemble a picture of what is happening to the characters.
Scott McCloud writes a lot about the theory of how comics work. One of his most famous observations is that in a comic, one panel shows static action and next to it is another panel that also shows static action. Meaning the story is created by the reader when he actively imagines what happens between those two panels. This is my belief on how transmedia works.
I think that goes a long way towards explaining how transmedia can help make a show more compelling.
What has been your favourite transmedia moment on The Lizzie Bennet Diaries so far?
I think it’s the first big one. Early on, we revealed the existence of the Darcy, Bing and Caroline twitter accounts, and that they’d been tweeting with each other for weeks. There was a collective sudden realization from our audience that the world of this show is much bigger than it first appeared to be.
I also love the entire thread of Gigi’s songs on This Is My Jam. It’s a lesser known service, but I was really interested to see if we could tell a story using just a character’s musical choices.
The show is clearly approaching the end of the novel, what will happen to the twitter and tumblr accounts when the series ends?
We’re talking about options. One thing we’re looking at are ways to archive the experience so that if somebody wants to watch from the beginning, there’s an easier way to get all of the important transmedia bits without having to hunt through the histories of multiple accounts. Most of these platforms are set up for real-time communication and don’t do a great job of giving you access to older content.
One thing I wouldn’t expect to see happen is a lot of continual posting from character accounts. One of the great things about stories is that they end. The curtain comes down, the lights come up, and we move on to the next tale. Also, it takes a lot of time and energy to maintain these accounts, so they can’t go on indefinitely.
What’s next for you after The Lizzie Bennet Diaries? Have you been working on any other projects?
I did some work on a project for HBO’s Game of Thrones, which you can see here. And I’ve got a number of projects in the works right now – including some other adaptations. I can’t talk a lot about these new projects yet, but I hope to be able to share news on them soon.