Storytelling Industries

Narrative Production in the 21st Century

Anthony N. Smith

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319705972
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entertainment Industry
• Index: Business

This book shows how the unique characteristics of traditionally differentiated media continue to determine narrative despite the recent digital convergence of media technologies. The author argues that media are now each largely defined by distinctive industrial practices that continue to preserve their identities and condition narrative production. Furthermore, the book demonstrates how a given medium's variability in institutional and technological contexts influences diverse approaches to storytelling. By connecting US film, television, comic book and video game industries to their popular fictional characters and universes; including Star Wars, Batman, Game of Thrones and Grand Theft Auto; the book identifies how differences in industrial practice between media inform narrative production. This book is a must read for students and scholars interested in transmedia storytelling.

© The Author(s) 2018

Anthony N. SmithStorytelling Industrieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70597-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Anthony N. Smith¹

(1)

University of Salford, Salford, UK

End Abstract

Conditions for fictional storytelling in media have altered considerably in recent years. The production, distribution and consumption of narrative across a range of media have become increasingly digitalised and linked to the internet. An accompanying industrial move towards conglomeration has led to large media corporations circulating popular characters and stories across multiple media platforms. Media studies typically refers to these developments as processes of media convergence.¹ For many commentators, media convergence contexts undermine customary distinctions between popular narrative media. In their introduction to New Narratives, a collection focused on digital media storytelling, for example, Ruth Page and Bronwen Thomas claim that ‘convergence’ demonstrates ‘the need to move beyond fixed categories and boundaries in attempting to respond to the ever shifting and evolving practices and affordances facilitated by new technologies’.²

This book challenges this position, stressing that the unique characteristics of traditionally differentiated media are essential to an understanding of contemporary popular narratives and wider media culture in the twenty-first century. It argues that distinct media are each characterised by unique industrial practices—such as particular approaches to content commissioning and distribution—that continue to preserve their identities and uniquely condition the ways in which their stories are told. Via a focus on popular storytelling forms—including film, television, comic-book and videogame series, it demonstrates how a given medium’s production conditions influence producers’ development and presentation of fictional narratives in the twenty-first century. As part of this process, the book considers the manner in which a medium’s contexts:

• shape the characters, settings and storylines that make up fictional storyworlds;
• influence how storylines and character developments are plotted across a narrative;
• determine the techniques of style—such as approaches to mise-en-scène—by which narratives present storyworlds.

By placing a strong emphasis on the continued significance of medium-specific industrial contexts, the book distinguishes itself from various other cross-media studies of popular fictional narrative. Such studies include those focused on transmedia storytelling, an industrial practice whereby content producers coordinate the dissemination of a given storyworld’s fragments across multiple media platforms, resulting in the presentation of a single coherent fictional narrative across media.³ Examples of such works in this field include Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Colin Harvey’s Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative, Play and Memory across Science Fiction and Fantasy Storyworlds and Martin Flanagan, Mike McKenny and Andy Livingstone’s The Marvel Studios Phenomenon: Inside a Transmedia Universe.⁴ While these and other such key works provide useful and illuminating examinations of transmedia storytelling processes, the significance of a given medium’s unique industrial culture to narrative creation is typically left under-explored within such analyses. Through a cross-media examination of popular fictional narrative that accounts for the primacy of a given medium’s unique set of industrial contexts, this book provides, within media studies, a unique perspective on storytelling across media.

This overriding concern with the role of medium specificity within the narrative creation process ultimately aligns the book with moves in narrative theory to analyse the ways in which a given medium’s unique combination of properties shapes storytelling. This field of transmedial narratology stresses the need to distinguish between the narrative capacities of one medium compared to another.⁵ Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, for example, asserts that a given medium’s unique combination of properties ‘open[s] up possibilities and impose[s] constraints’ upon narrative.⁶ As Chap. 2 establishes in detail, a medium can do so by affording (or withholding) the use of certain semiotic phenomena.⁷ For example, the medium of television enables television producers to use words, images and/or sounds during their construction of a television drama episode. A medium’s set of established cultural practices can further influence a narrative’s constituent parts.⁸ For example, as Chaps. 2 and 3 detail, the practice of inserting commercial breaks within transmissions of television drama episodes can influence producers to craft episode act structures that complement such insertions.

While this focus upon medium specificity within transmedial narratology has considerably influenced this book, a common trait among works from this field is to conceptualise an individual medium as a fixed homogeneous system and/or neglect to account for a medium’s variable industrial conditions. An example of this tendency may be found in Helen Fulton’s study of narrative and media. Fulton usefully observes the importance to narrative of industrial organisation within a medium. ‘The economic structure of media industries determines [narrative] output’, she stresses. But, crucially, while she emphasises the variability of industrial configuration between media, there is a failure to acknowledge and explore the potential for such variability within a single medium.⁹ This paradigm whereby a given medium’s stability appears taken for granted is a general reflection of the transmedial narratological approach.

Media are not stable entities, but rather protean cultural formations, each with elements that can vary greatly, including the capacity of technologies, the composition of audiences, the configuration of institutional economics and the organisation and regulation of national/regional markets. This book, then, conducts a thorough examination of narrative and media by considering not only the narrative implications of discrepancies in industrial practices between media, but also of differences in production conditions within a given medium. The book examines the degree to which the specificities of a range of variable industrial factors within a single medium can contribute to multiple contrasting sets of narrative production conditions. Such variable industrial contexts that the book explores include:

• institutionally configured revenue models (i.e. the particular means by which media institutions generate revenue via the dissemination of a narrative text);
• intended target audiences (i.e. the particular demographic groups that media institutions intend to appeal to via the dissemination of a narrative text);
• technologies of production, dissemination and consumption (i.e. the particular technologies that media institutions utilise in the construction and distribution of narrative texts, and the technologies by which media audiences consume them).

To ascertain the complex ways by which medium-specific industrial factors distinctly inform the creation of narratives, the book explores, across various narrative media, the processes by which narrative texts are assembled. Considering each medium on its own terms, it traces the connections between production processes and the particular industrial contexts within which these practices are situated. To this end, the book combines detailed narrative analyses with extensive research into industry practices. David Bordwell labels this approach to research, whereby a narrative’s features are considered in relation to their historical, industrial and technological conditions of production, as ‘historical poetics’.¹⁰ Recent significant works that have adopted the historical poetics approach in media studies include Jeremy G. Butler’s Television Style, Trisha Dunleavy’s Television Drama: Form, Agency, Innovation and Jason Mittell’s Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling; each of these expertly connects television narratives to their production conditions.¹¹ Via its distinctive cross-media focus, this book makes a unique contribution to this body of work.

In order to achieve a logical consistency between its narrative case studies across media, the book restricts its focus to a particular narrative category that is universal within media culture: serial narrative. A narrative within this category can be broadly defined as one that evokes an ongoing storyworld across a sequence of textual instalments, with the distribution of each new instalment usually separated by an interval from the last. Due to this particular mode of production and distribution, the dissemination and consumption of a single narrative text can potentially span weeks, months, years or even decades. This narrative category has proved a pervasive method by which media institutions have attempted to offset the high degrees of financial risk associated with cultural industrial production.¹² With its ongoing narrative deferral, the serial format’s potential to reduce financial risk stems from its capacity to nurture the loyal consumers who purchase and/or engage with a succession of narrative instalments so as to discover ‘what happened next’ within the storyworld.¹³ The format first began being widely implemented in the West from the 1830s onward as part of publishers’ efforts to mass circulate literary narrative fiction for the first time. In the twenty-first century, serial narratives remain a constant presence within media landscapes; the format is ubiquitous within television and comics, for example, while—as the book details—many of the most popular narrative properties in film and videogames garner loyalty due in part to their evocation of ongoing storyworlds across multiple instalments.

The book creates further logical consistency between its case studies by restricting its focus to a particular national context: the United States. This decision is an appropriate one due to the nation’s powerful cultural relevance in this period. As a primary provider of popular entertainment the world over, the ongoing storyworlds the US disseminates—via such media as film, television, comics, literature and videogames—have a cultural impact that reverberates widely. Using a set of terms applicable across different US media contexts, the book labels as processes of narrative design the modes of production activity through which narratives form. Those individuals engaged in these processes, the members of collaborative teams that, say, bring television series to screens or comics panels to pages, are referred to as narrative designers. The changeable production conditions that industrial factors combine to establish are referred to as conditions of narrative design.

Chapter 2 establishes the book’s distinctive theoretical positioning concerning the relationship between narrative and media. Divided into two main sections, the chapter’s first section confirms the significance of medium specificity to narrative design conditions and processes within...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Narratives in the Media Convergence Era: The Industrial Dimensions of Medium Specificity
• 3. Economic Specificity in Narrative Design: The Business of Television Drama Storytelling
• 4. Audience Specificity in Narrative Design: Comic-Book Storytelling in the Inclusivity Era
• 5. Technological Specificity in Narrative Design: Story-Driven Videogame Series in an Upgrade Culture
• 6. Conclusion
• Back Matter