Page 73 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014a narrative resource, it was also used to sell extra content and contribute to the funding of the project (the full‐length feature film can be seen free on line).Some successful children’s productions such as Las tres mellizas, translated into 35 languages and seen in more than 150 countries, can, to all effects, be considered transmedia storytelling. This narrative world appeared during the early 1980s and was based on the books by Roser Capdevila. During the following decade it expanded to the worlds of television, cinema, the digital environment, theatre and countless games and merchandising products. Las tres mellizas is one of the most important transmedia products to have been generated by the Spanish cultural industries.kind of production, disseminating it and thereby enrich the transmedia storytelling thus created.The lack of legislation covering these new realities often tends to cause a short circuit between users and producers, or indeed, between producers and distributors. In the case of users and producers what is needed is legislation that covers the not‐for‐profit textual appropriations of users. In this respect, the various Creative Commons licenses could be of great use for dealing with these works which have no commercial purpose. Relations between producers and distributors tend to be no less complex and are expressed, for example, through the administration of the on‐line space for a specific work. It can be said that the legislation covering audiovisual production is still, in large measure, “monomedia” legislation and does not contemplate situations created by transmedia storytelling.From an industrial point of view, it could be said that traditional communication companies find it difficult to adapt to transmedia productions and that they are what we might call “monomedia companies”. With respect to the large multimedia groups, these would apparently fulfil all the conditions necessary to create transmedia works (there are groups that include TV studios, book‐publishing companies and so forth), but they often find it very complicated to combine the various productive units, which consequently continue to operate in an individual and independent way. Finally, for the small companies that have been established over the last decade only a small effort is required to design and develop transmedia storytelling worlds. These companies, often founded by young professional people, have a transmedia DNA written into them; they are native transmedia companies.To sum up, we could say that it is only recently that transmedia storytelling has been taking its first steps in Spain. It is not proving easy, especially for traditional monomedia companies, to “think in transmedia terms”. But, the fact can not be ignored: we are faced with an irreversible transformation process. Companies and other actors in the communication world are going to be obliged toWith regard tocontentgenerated byusers, Spanishfans can hardlybe differentiatedfrom those ofother countries.While it may be true to say that the quantity of user‐ generated textual production does not reach the levels of that of the large, global market blockbusters, the level of creativity in their works has nothing to fear through any comparison with that of other communities of fans. Local productions such as, for example, Amar en tiempos revueltos, and foreign production such as Fringe or Lost, have inspired a vast amount of fanfiction from Spanish fans. When the storytelling is good, the fans do not let the opportunity of contributing their texts to the transmedia story escape them.Unfortunately, the users’ textual production is hardly ever utilised by the creators of narrative worlds since the latter often do not inhabit spaces in which they might interact with the fans. Little by little, however, Spanish producers are beginning to understand that they should never underestimate the content generated by users and that, on the contrary, they should create ways of promoting thisAC/EDevices should be created to facilitate users' production, to disseminate it and enrich the transmedia storytelling created by themWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 6: TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING: NEW WAYS OF COMMUNICATING IN THE DIGITAL AGE CURRENT PAGE...73