Convergence Fueled Storytelling
Discussing The Matrix’s excellent storytelling techniques is not quite a difficult task. This 1999 movie was ahead of its time in many ways. The visual and sound effects were groundbreaking, and the basic storytelling principles transcended the boundaries of film, comic books, and the internet. It helped that the film’s story was fairly dependent on the internet and the idea of convergence. To my knowledge The Matrix was one of the first films that didn’t stop at the end of the movie, yet continued to tell its story through different avenues. I remember being in middle school when I first saw the Matrix. I specifically remember writing short stories involving myself with the Matrix’s characters. Little 11 year-old Paul definitely wasn’t the only creative person inspired by this movie. There have been countless websites, books, comics, short films, animations, etc that have helped expand this story.
More recently, movies have used the internet and other storytelling medians to not only expand the universe of the story, but to help promote the movie as well. The biggest example that comes to my mind was the movie The Watchmen that came out earlier this year (March 2009). This movie was adapted for the screen from the groundbreaking graphic novel. Essentially, this movie already had a pretty remarkable fan base, yet the producers needed to grasp the attention of people who had not read the novel. The most obvious convergence fueled example was when the producers released a digital representation of the graphic novel. This was pretty much a series of videos of the panels of the graphic novel, with an audio track reading the book word for word. This refreshed the memory of people who had read the story, and helped the people understand the quite confusing plot who had no knowledge of the Watchmen universe.
In my opinion, these new storytelling techniques are extremely effective no matter the age of the audience. As long as a person is interested in the original story, they will usually be positively effected by its related material.
Convergence does fuel storytelling but I wonder about how substantial those secondary sources are. Someone may expand the Matrix concept but how well is their version executed? Does it contribute or detract from the original concept?
ReplyDeleteI remember watching the Matrix for the first time and not getting it. I did discuss it with the friends I saw it with and we revealed in its mystery then watched it again. I was not elite enough to get online and discuss the movie in forums. Later I did watch the AniMatrix online and enjoyed getting more of the story but at the time I had no idea there was more out there to be found.
ReplyDeleteI think that you make some interesting points in your post, in relation to Watchmen. The motion comics came out over a series of a few months, and gradually allowed people who wouldn't normally read a comic to experience the graphic novel in much the same way it was presented in the original book. This helped create some hype around the movie, and helped to bring the Watchmen graphic novel to more people's eyes. The hype also helped to get more people to read the original story, which made many more people excited to see the movie. Around the same time, a Watchmen video game came out that expanded the story by showing events that happened before the novel. Through the use of retelling the story in different mediums, as well as expanding it, they make it much more visible to a wider audience. Which I think is what convergence is all about; bringing everyone together to a subject while expanding that subject into a lot of new mediums.
ReplyDelete