Pushing boundaries
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Dave Boivin is quite a character with a passion for giving stories a life beyond the page, stage and screen, as Anna Jackson reveals in this interview with the transmedia producer on storytelling and pushing boundaries.
It follows his unique presentation at TEDx Auckland recently, where Dave spoke passionately of the potential of transmedia to reclaim the power of storytelling and make media experiences more empowering and participatory.
How did you become a transmedia producer?
I started out as a fan - the place all good creators of media come from. I worked for about four years at the cinemas in Newmarket, and it wasn’t a glamourous job but I loved it. I saw just about every film that was showing. I’m talking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – before Michael Bay got his hands on them. The multiplex was like film school for me. But I wasn’t just studying the films; I was watching the audiences, their responses, their desire to be part of something bigger, to engage more deeply with the material. And that led me to get involved in what I guess you could call experiential marketing, creating experiences that gave the audience the opportunity to engage with the material before and after the screening.
In the early days that basically just mean small ‘stunts’ in and around the cinema, but as we’ve become more digitally connected, my work has expanded way beyond marketing. Now with transmedia, we’re crafting stories that travel across platforms the way that audiences do, creating experiences that allow them to go much deeper.
Do you think transmedia has had much of an impact in New Zealand? Most filmmakers, for example, don’t have the budget to create a lot of extra content or spend a lot on marketing and publicity.
Transmedia is much more humble here that’s true, and I think a lot of people are exploring what I would describe as transmedia storytelling, but they’re not necessarily calling it that. What We Do in the Shadows for example – I’ve never heard the team behind that project use the word ‘transmedia’ but what they’ve created is a storyworld that is incredibly engaging across multiple platforms and invites the audience to participate and create in a very satisfying way. The Generation of Z is another local project that definitely takes a transmedia approach and again, audiences have really responded because it’s so empowering. And fun, obviously. Zombies are cool (so are vampires by the way).
I'm not particularly pedantic about the rules of transmedia though. I went to Jeff Gomez’s masterclass recently, and I think he said that transmedia has to include at least 3 platforms. Well, for me the platforms don’t really matter all that much. The experience is more important, and the way that it engages the audience. I was really provoked to think about this recently, when I went to this dance show, The Status of Being which is supposed to be interactive but (and this is kind of a spoiler), it turns out the audience don’t really have any real choice. It’s a pretty strong critique actually of the whole notion of participation and interactivity and engagement. All those words we throw around. That show made me think, which is what art should do. Is that kind of meta-transmedia, proto-transmedia, post-transmedia... ? I don’t know. I just think, we can get hung up on labels, and transmedia is just a word. Actions are more important.
Speaking of meta-transmedia, is it true that you're working on a project with Toa Fraser, but you're also a character in a play he’s written?
I’ve known Toa for a long time, since we worked together at the cinemas in the late 90’s. He’s a total film geek, like me. And yes, we’re working on a project right now, an adaptation of a Robert Louis Stevenson novel – lots of action, adventure, romance and mystery in the South Pacific. But I’m not going to spill the beans on that one.
The play is... complicated. After Toa left the cinemas his first success, really, was this play called Bare. And one of the main characters is called Dave and he….well lets just say he does have a lot of similarity to me. But, Toa has always weaved a lot of reality into his work. There are a lot of real people in that play, like his cousin Gareth for example. At the time it was a bit weird, and I did have a few questions to begin with, when I found out he was doing another show (Pure and Deep). But now I think that what he’s doing with the theatre shows is really interesting. In fact, maybe he was way ahead of me with the transmedia thing, blazing the interactive trail while I was still selling upsized popcorns to teenyboppers. We’re all characters, storytellers, performers in a way – I guess I’ve gone cross-platform. I’m already thinking it could go further... ‘Dave – The Game’ would be pretty awesome, maybe some spin-off webisodes...?