Chapter Nineteen:

Trans-Media Narration via Modular Exposure

In 1998, a film was released that depicted a group of campers lost in Pine Barrens who are eventually murdered leaving the evidence in the form of damaged reels of tape. Shot in a documentary style entirely on digital film, this was the first movie to be theatrically released digitally via satellite to theaters across the United States. The name of the film was The Last Broadcast, and while the ideas in the film were somewhat compelling, it wasn't until The Blair Witch Project came out the following year that The Last Broadcast gained much notice, mainly because it became quite obvious in retrospect that the makers of The Blair Witch Project had seen and appropriated a number of ideas from the film. That didn't stop The Blair Witch Project from becoming the trans-media hit of 1999. The Blair Witch Project was one of the first successful trans-media stories because it leveraged the unique attributes of the Internet, incorporated early search engine optimization techniques, and leveraged the natural inclination of social groups.

"What we learned from Blair Witch is that if you give people enough stuff to explore, they will explore. Not everyone but some of them will. The people who do explore and take advantage of the whole world will forever be your fans, will give you an energy you can't buy through advertising--It's this web of information that is laid out in a way that keeps people interested and keeps people working for it. If people have to work for something they devote more time to it. And they give it more emotional value."

Now, with the increased sophistication of the Net and its users, substituting local myths with embedded narratives becomes a good deal more complicated, and it is doubtful that The Blair Witch Project, if released in the same way today, would have the same groundbreaking effect. However, some of the techniques will always be effective, and alternate reality games, like those outlined in the book This Is Not A Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming by Dave Szulborski, have relied on similar ways of spreading buzz via online social groups. With a few of these ideas as a basis, a marketing construct that is interwoven with the narrative sequence of the filmic footage can be generated that can easily capitalize on its independent and filmic qualities.