Archive for the ‘Transmedia’ Category

  • In The Night Garden: Transmedia storytelling platform for babies

    A recent post by Henry Jenkins got me thinking about In The Night Garden as a Transmedia storytelling platform.

    In his post, He-Man and The Masters of Transmedia he describes the way kids’ cartoon He-Man and The Masters Of The Universe and the many bizarre action figures it spawned as:

    An authoring system which encouraged young people to make up their own stories about these characters much as the folk in other time periods might make up stories about Robin Hood or Pecos Bill.

    And he notes that:

    In some ways, contemporary transmedia is being produced by kids who grew up playing with He-Man to be consumed by kids who grew up playing Pokemon.

    This set me thinking, as I have recently become a regular viewer of In The Night Garden.

    For those of you without kids or living in foreign parts, I should explain briefly. In The Night Garden, or ‘Night Garden’ as professionals like myself call it, is a BBC children’s television series aimed at one to four year olds. It launched in 2007 with 100 half-hour episodes and cost £15m. Everything in it – literally everything – is merchandised, and the  show’s creators designed it specifically to plug in to the universal bedtime ritual, as Producer Anne Wood has described:

    “We became very aware of the anxiety surrounding the care of young children which manifested itself in all kind of directions – but the one big subject that came up again and again was bedtime. It’s the classic time for tension between children who want to stay up and parents who want them to go to bed… so this is a programme about calming things down whereas most children’s TV is about gee-ing everything up!”

    At the end of the day – and for once I really mean the actual end of the day, when Night Garden is on air – it meets a real need for parents as well. It’s basically half an hour off before ‘the final assault’.

    The show is huge in the UK, and although parents have expressed anxiety about the fact that something is going that they don’t quite understand, it’s become a story world with multiple entry-points that facilitate generative play – in this case for babies who aren’t even at the talking stage. We’re starting them young on this stuff. I think Night Garden is already the biggest brand in my little son’s life. Can they get any earlier? I mean, can we do Transmedia for foetuses?

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    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    10th June 10

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     Transmedia

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