The Web Series, the Film, Transmedia

The web series

The weekly web series will roll out in fall 2012. There is no “right order” in the episodes/chapters, the order of broadcasting is only a suggestion. The audience can choose to watch them in which over order they prefer. Receiving the information in a different chronological order will influence a viewer’s emotional journey and color her reaction to the story, and that is an experiment we would like to encourage. It is also important to stress that this is an exploration of the storyworld and the characters – so it may include story beats which do not make “plot sense,” but do make sense in view of the whole.

The film

In Spring 2013 we will be re-assembling the characters for ten days of shooting on the set of a retreat, where the wedding of Maria and Cybil is going to take place.

It will be left open till several weeks before the shoot, as to when exactly in the timeline of the story this will be. This will obviously determine the constellation of characters assembled: will it be a moment in time before Tomas and Alis have separated? Or are they in the middle of their bitter court battle? Does Alis arrive with Marc – are they still together? In whichever constellation, the friends arrive for the weekend. They are invited to the wedding of Maria, Tomas’ sister, who is finally marrying her long time girlfriend Cybil (the movie starts on the morning after, when everyone wakes up with a hangover.) Obliged to stay together for much longer than they were initially planning to do, because of the weather, the friends manage to get everything under control, when a mysterious guest arrives… and then another, who seems to have followed him/her…

Why Transmedia?

Transmedia is a bit of a fashionable word now. However, whatever it is, it almost always stops on the surface – the technology and the plot mechanics take over. With this project we may have a real chance to get deeper, to make people care, to embrace it as if it were their own story, their own personal experience. The theme is, of course, of great importance. We all have had our hearts broken and wonder whether we will love more than being loved… and whether we will end up hurting.

This is the kind of project which calls for exploration – emotional and existential exploration. With two hours film you can only explore a part of a world. With the web series and the interaction around it we are going deep but also wide. To quote David Lynch: “Theoretically, you can get a very deep story and you can go so deep and open the world so beautifully, but it takes time to do that.”

So we are taking time – time to tell the whole story, not just story simplex as even web and transmedia projects seem to prefer, even if there is no need for lack of experimentation. The combination of web series and movie (storywise, one flows into the other) is a commitment to deep story. But it is also a story about the mechanisms of storytelling and how they define our lives.

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