What is cross-over media?

When was the last time that you bought a multimedia PC? Well if you ignore Media Centre PC, virtually all new systems come with the multimedia parts that used to be such an expensive option a few years ago. What was multimedia? Then it was just a sound card and a pair of speakers, and possibly a microphone that stayed in the box. Nowadays we define multimedia differently. Today we actually have content that is multimedia. In fact wiki describes multimedia as:

media that uses multiple forms of information content and information processing (e.g. text, audio, graphics, animation, video, interactivity) to inform or entertain the (user) audience.

Pretty much any commercial website has all of this now, sound, video, animations, flash and interactivity.
But I've recently been fascinated by a sort of media that seems to span different media. You could say that this is multimedia, but not really in its original sense. I have come across two recent examples.

Some cross-over Media examples.

The first is Lost. Lost is simply a TV show, by ABC. The premise is simple, but the show is littered with mysteries and questions - which make it fun. As most popular television today it has a website, where you can see extra clips, get geeky fanboy facts, and find other details. They have a podcast as well, which in part has a discussion by the writers which I enjoy. You can buy episodes on iTunes, and no doubt download many other fan podcasts and fiction and discussion about the show. This isnt the multimedia that I am talking about though, as its basically television and fandom as I have explained it so far.

What I think it wonderful is the producers put Easter eggs within the show. For example, companies are mentioned within the story. If you Google the name of the company you find a website about it. Now have the production team or fans created this? Well originally you couldnt tell, but the content of the site, in real life, added to the mythology of the show. It made you think, is this a real company, or is it part of Lost? The more you researched the more information you found out there. I love this sort of stuff. Again this seems to be just tv and the web, but there was another media jump that I found.

Listening to the official Lost podcast, they included some audio of a question and answer session at a fan convention, which I would have loved to see the video of. The panel was taking questions from the audience as you would usually do, when a activist took control of the mike, bitterly and vocally complaining about one of the organisations in Lost, and what they were responsible for. Now, if this had been a real activist, they would have cut the mic, and definitely not included it in the official podcast. It could have been a fan, but, again the mic was on them way too long before they were escorted out by security. So this must have been a hired actor, working though a scripted hysterical outburst. I thought this was a brilliant cross over.

The second example of this is a book called the Rookie by Scot Sigler. Scott produces several very gory podcast only novels, where he reads his work chapter by chapter for his podcast junkies each week. Im not sure if this is his day job, or his career, or if he has written books before, but he writes well. The books wont be to everyones taste. Each week he mentions various emails that he has received, and talks about some of them, mostly feedback about his work. He ran a competition where the winner had his name and a part written into his book, which I thought was a good real life/fiction cross over. The book is about an American Football league, but one set in space with different races playing. Now each match that the team has in the book is logged on the league website, which is a clever idea to start with. Then, when a match has been described in the podcast episode, some other people do an post game report. Great! It turns out that these guys normally do commentary on real life games as well.

Then, a fan created the teams space ship and put it into Second Life. After one of the games, a press conference was set up in Second Life, where you could go into the ship and watch it and take part in the conference. Wow! Any responses that the players in the conference made then might be fed back into the book in the next chapter. I thought this was very, very clever.

Im sure there are more examples of this, and after writing this all out, Im going to call this cross-over media from now on. Did I create a new thing?

03 Jan 07 Add comment | Permanent Link blog comments powered by Disqus