I didn’t know they were your students! I found the video quite inspiring because of the mix of ideas presented in it, and obviously because it is a handy springboard for a greater discussion about intertextual relations. I was actually thinking that a video of transmedia relations really is needed now, to augment the one created by your Mickey and Scott. I should do that as I have a truck load of examples in my repository…

But as for the video and how your students interpreted Jenkins’s work. I find it really interested that there is a default mono-story paradigm when talking about texts across multiple media. So, there is a mono-media platform perspective that many have (that the medium content begins in will be the medium the content continues in), and a mono-story perspective (that any content in another platform that is related will be the same story). Both of these assumptions are understandable given the prevalent practices over the last few decades.

But I’m fascinated in the reasons why some people naturally see through a multi-text, multi-story and multiple platform, some take a long time to see and some just don’t. Is there is a schema, in other words, that governs this way of conceptualising that affects not only how media relations are seen? There are neurological studies that identify ‘holistic’ and ‘reductionist’ operators in the brain. I do not feel comfortable, however, with bundling media understanding with a neurological capacity. I make it my mission, though, to help people see a little differently.

N.B. The particular ways of seeing that I am talking about come under what Sue Thomas et. al. now call a reading ‘transliteracy‘. I like the term.

So this may be a case less of transmediation, and more of dramatic irony or radical intertextuality. The video you analyze was a project made by two of my undergraduates in my class Media Technology & Cultural Change this spring. The assignment was to make a remix video that offered some critical commentary or exploration of media, using only found footage, and posting the result to YouTube. It was made shortly after reading Convergence Culture and a campus lecture from Henry Jenkins. Scott & Mickey did a nice job exploring the historicity & pervasiveness of transmediation, although I think they (admittedly) struggled with trying to get the footage to make an argument rather than just present examples.

I’m glad you found it worthy of analysis – and I figured some “authorial intent” might help clarify it! I’ll be blogging about more of my students’ work in this course in the coming weeks.
-Jason