When I was a little kid, my best friend and I had some imaginary friends. Their names were Ferdinand and Isabella (hers and mine, respectively) and they were tiny dragons, just up to our knees. I don’t remember what hers looked like, but mine was lime green and hot pink, and I have a vivid sense-memory of imagining how it would be to cuddle a dragon.

We’d play with Ferdy and Izzy, as we called them, constantly. Whenever we built forts out of our parents’ furniture, they were dragon caverns. We’d tell each other stories about them. We drew elaborate maps of where they lived, and if we’d had access to video cameras, I’m sure we would have tried to make home movies about them. When we went to school and were asked to do writing assignments, we wrote about Ferdy and Izzy. There was no part of our lives that they didn’t touch.

When my best friend and I sat down and told each other stories about our imaginary dragons, we were just doing what came naturally - imagining, dreaming, hoping. It was just as natural for us to get up from the couch and go do something to extend that story into the real world: “Okay, you build a couch fort. I’ll draw the map. Then we’ll record a song that Ferdy and Izzy like to sing on the tape-recorder. And then let’s watch a movie about dragons!”

In the end, that’s basically what transmedia storytelling is about. It’s about letting a story get its tendrils into every part of your life, and it’s about suspension of disbelief. My best friend and I didn’t really believe that we had invisible dragons named Ferdinand and Isabella. We knew that they were just made-up imaginary friends. But we wanted so badly to believe! It was such a cool idea! And when we drew a map, or when we pretended we were feeding part of our lunches to our dragons, or when we watched a movie with special-effects dragons that looked photorealistic - the story-world drew a little closer to our world. We could suspend our disbelief a little more. We could almost feel the warmth of the dragons’ bodies next to our own, could almost feel the puff of their smoky breath against our hands.

It’s hard to recapture that feeling as an adult. It’s really difficult for me - for anyone, I’d imagine - to drop my inhibitions and really believe in a story-world. But when I begin to see pieces of the world everywhere - then I begin to believe. When I watch a television show, and read a comic about it, and then discover that the characters are actually carrying on a conversation on a social network - that they’ll respond to my comments! - I begin to believe. When I see ads that belong to the story-world, ads for True Blood or for Oceanic Airlines, I do a double-take. I think, is there really an Oceanic Airlines? When I receive a business card from Stark Enterprises, and I fill out a job application to work with Iron Man, and I actually get a call back - then I’m hooked. Then I’m in deep.

And that’s not just true for me, either. After all - you played make-believe, too, didn’t you? So you’ve already had the prototypical transmedia experience. You already know that once you believe in something with all your heart, you’ll remember it forever.

Here we are at FOE4, and Henry Jenkins has just gave his keynote about Transmedia Storytelling Principles. Amazing.

For our clients and those of you who have seen our speeches/workshops, this we are about to show is not new. But after seeing Henry's principles we wanted to share one of our Patron Saints, the most important: Scheherazade (in the US) or Sherazade (in Brazil), from the Arabian Nights.

For us, she was one of the first storytellers to make a hyperlinked story that really got all the transmedia principles (above). And she is one of the reasons of why our motto is "Transmedia Storytelling since 3000 B.C.":

• Drillability
  Every story Scheherazade went deeper and deeper. She created an entire universe around the rabbit holes she created in her text. For example, in Aladdin's story - she dug into the story of the magic carpet, explaining why it was magic.
• Continuity vs. Multiplicity
  The great majority of the Arabian Nights had stories that had continuity between each other... and 1001 nights, 1001 stories, certainly provides multiplicity!
• Immersion/Extractability
  The sheer immersiveness of Scheherazade's stories were what made the Sultan fall in love with her (and give up on killing her). Many of the stories became extracts and parallel plots.
• World Building
  By breathing life into Arabian mythology & legends, Scheherazade built that immersive world, that world where you can drill down deeply and explore broadly. And she references specific historical people - building the world out further and connecting it up to reality.
• Seriality
  Come on. There's 1001 nights. If that isn't serial, I don't know what is!
• Subjectivity
  Look at the titles of the stories in the 1001 nights: they're all referring to specific people. All these characters, all these perspectives - all these different understandings of a shared story-world!
• Performance
  Scheherezade's storytelling isn't written. It's a complete performance - and it saves her life and thousands of others...
  

We received tons of emails from friends all over the world sending greetings about the Olympics in Rio. Thank you all. This is a big win and the start of a very interesting approach on sports, media and citizenship. More to come....

Photo sent by David Charles!

Vídeo-entrevista para o jornal Propaganda e Marketing sobre nossa empresa e a aliança que montamos com a AgênciaClick. Muito bom dividir a tela com o Abel Reis!

Our video interview for the Lions Daily website. Lions Daily is the official news source of the Festival. The questions were great. We talked about Shakespeare, Borges, buckets, mothership etc...

On June 27th we were at Cannes giving a seminar about Transmedia Storytelling and doing a homage to C3 and Henry Jenkins. Although it was the last day, we had a very attentive audience :).
During the seminar we launched the Alchemists Network, a ThinkDO Tank focused on delivering strategies and developing transmedia content and projects.

Many people from Brazil and abroad are asking for this video, so we decided to put it here while the new layout is not set. Hope you like it!

November 17th, 2007, Cambridge, at MIT. The Alchemist gathered for the first time ever, without knowing they would become a blog and then a company one year after that. Transmedia Storytelling was brought to the public during an event and to Brazil for the first time in a blog about media and advertising. And our Convergence Culture Jedi, Henry Jenkins was starting to spread the word and the term through the world.

While we organize our new blog we are feeding this one with as many content as possible. And look what we found: one of the first interviews about Transmedia Storytelling we did. It was hosted by the amazing Digital Producer Jedi Kazi, from Colmeia. They were the first to embrace the idea and are the producers of our almost ready IPTV show.

Dudu, Kazi and Passamani, thank you again.

Good to be here. Thanks to Mauricio for putting this together.

Been interested in the campaign for the Universal Film “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”. There was tons of chatter about it around LA when it first hit the majority of our billboards. If you’re in any major North American city, you were most likely exposed to outdoor media that looks like this:

The teaser campaign is a good example of simple transmedia storytelling.

Rumor has it the whole concept came about because the best scenes in the film were too risqué for American TV broadcast standards. So the marketing folks cooked up a clever way to get people to check out their restricted video trailer.

The result, an easy-to-access Alternate Reality Experience (ARE) that leaves anyone who follows the breadcrumbs with just a bit of conviction to a deeper connection to the content.

Here’s how it worked: All over town, there were billboards, subway signs, and bus posters like so...

Following the URL on the ad,

you’re taken to an inUniverse BLOG set up by Peter Bretter, the television music composer who's been dumped by Sarah Marshall. There, you can watch a short Access Hollywood-style video explaining how Peter got the money to plaster his ‘I Hate Sarah’ billboards all over town.

Clicking the most provocative link on the BLOG brings you to the "restricted" trailer site.

Digging deeper, they’ve filled out their characters, story, and world with some other sites like a faux NBC.com TV page for “Crime Scene” – Sarah Marshall's TV series and a Myspace page for Infant Sorrow, Aldous Snow's band. He's the Eurorocker Sarah's chosen over Peter.

Unfortunately, the follow-up to the teaser campaign probably left some disconnect between the catchy outdoor and the fact that they were really advertising a Judd Apatow-produced film that's getting a ton of critical love.

It opened this weekend in the US (April 18th) to the tune of $17.7 million dollars. Not the biggest Apatow opening ever. For comparison’s sake, here’s a list of some of his troupes' past opening weekends starting with the most recent release:

* Forgetting Sarah Marshall -- $17.7 Million
* Drillbit Taylor -- $10.3 Million
* Walk Tall: The Dewey Cox Story -- $4.1 Million
* Superbad -- $33 Million
* Knocked Up -- $30.6 million
* Talladega Nights -- $47 Million
* 40 Year Old Virgin -- $21 Million
* Anchorman -- $28 Million

Universal deserves credit for taking a creative risk and using their marketing money to deepen their narrative – especially for a comedy. If “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” ran away with the weekend (it came in second to "Forbidden Kingdom's" $21.4 Million), it could have proven a HUGE step in the direction of allocating future funds towards transmedia storytelling.

Other opporunities for success remain.

Rumor has it 42 Entertainment/Warner Bros' "The Dark Knight" ARG is up to 3,000,000 participants. If strong transmedia campaigns can be translated into box office dollars, it’ll provide content creators with a lot more opportunity to extend their narrative and ultimately deepen the relationships with the audience and their content.

Sony just launched a similar campaign for their upcoming release "Hancock". Judge for yourself here.

Transmedia narratives, as conceived of by Henry Jenkins, originally grew from filmic content, spreading the narrative out into other channels, loading games and cartoons with elements of the plot.

The clever people at Penguin UK have taken the model and adapted it for a much older form of storytelling.

We Tell Stories extends the books off the page into the interactive spaces of the web and reality, allowing readerwriters to contribute to the narratives and pulling in ARG elements to appeal to a generation bred on games.

6 stories will unfold week by week, but there is a seventh story, hidden somewhere on the web, that requires its readers to find and complete it.

As the site says: These stories could not have been written 200, 20 or even 2 years ago.