This week we looked at a variety of webseries including High Maintaince, The Guild and Starting from Now, and thought up hyperthetical transmedia stories that could be told expanding on these stories.

I found it quite difficult to think of any that were not contrived at best, or shameless marketing/tie-ins at worst, since the webseries were not really suited for expansion into a multi-thread story across different platforms. Ideas that we came up with included:

• A feature length film about the Weed Guy from High Maintenance, that follows his adventures as he pops in and out of other stories in progress and without proper context, the opposite of the show.
• Flesh out the Cult from the episode of High Maintainance and fully construct the website, perhaps using discussion forums to expand on the story of the guy from that episode.

These idea’s wernt terrible and might be interesting to engage with, but the problem was that they felt contrived and unnecessary, and showing too much backstory can indeed tarnish the original stories. I think this exercise goes to show the importance of planning for transmedia, expanding on something that was never intended to be expanded upon is very difficult, whereas if a story is planned to have multiple platforms and narrative threads at its inception (for example the MCU) then it can work very well.