A fantastic day at Power to the Pixel’s London Cross-Media Forum. The twelve presentations included five case studies which gave us an inside look at some of the coolest transmedia projects around today.

Of the morning presentations my favourite was probably The Birth of a Language by Michel Reilhac of ARTE France. Michel points out that in the very early days of cinema audiences didn’t realize that the train on the screen wasn’t going to run them over. They didn’t know the language of film. That’s developed over a number of years to become quite a sophisticated visual language which we — in the west at least — are fluent in.

He believes that a new language is developing, the language of transmedia storytelling. This language isn’t visual. It’s behavioural. Michel went through some of the vocabulary:

Playing — a familiar idea, but he believes that play will become an increasingly important behaviour as transmedia grows and that it won’t just be for kids. Everyone’s going to be playing all of the time. Yay!

Hoaxing — this one’s got a negative connotation at the moment, but Michel thinks that’s going to change. Transmedia will blue the lines between fact and fiction and create multiple alternate realities. Real reality will cease to be so important, what’s so great about this reality when in the next one over you can fly or you live on another planet or you’re a student at Hogwarts?

Sharing — If you’re already hanging out on the web, you’re already sharing — or over sharing in some cases.

Creating: Many of today’s speakers talked about co-creating and giving audiences the opportunity to create and make. Michel things this is an essential of the transmedia vocabulary.

He touched on other aspects of this new language including managing privacy and caring for others.

I ran out of power on my laptop at that point and became sort of fixated on that. I’m not sure whether he mentioned assessing trustworthiness or whether I made that up. If it’s an original thought of my own or just a direct steal from him, I think this part of our new language. We are learning to recognize the difference between a scam email and a real one, between information on Wikipedia that is real and an addition made by a high school student on a lark. And we’re trying to figure out who is real, who is fictional and who is an edited version of themselves.

So many other great presentations! And more coming.

What a wonderful conference. Get here next year.