As you can see there,
I've come to talk to you about Transmedia,
maybe this is all Greek to you.
But, well, basically, as you can see, my passion is storytelling.
And Transmedia, you see, is a way of telling stories.
But I'm going to talk about Transmedia as a development engine.
It isn't simply telling stories; it's telling stories for something.
OK, I've already been introduced, so this may not be very useful.
I'll keep this image:
that's me a couple of years ago.
This may happen to many of you,
but when people ask me what I do,
I find it very hard because, well, what is it that I do?
I was once in Germany, at a meeting, and I was asked: what do you do?
Before me, there was a biologist, a philologist,
and I told him: "I create worlds and tell stories".
And, of course, everybody laughed
and afterwards told me: "No, really, what do you do?".
And I told them that, indeed, what I did was telling stories and creating worlds.
It took a while.
This is what I've come to explain to you,
but, in order to do that, I have to go back to the beginning of all this.
It all started in late 1997.
Back then, I went for the first time to a narrative show:
storytelling.
I got there, more out of obligation than anything.
And well, I loved it.
After seeing it,
right when it ended, I knew that
it was exactly what I wanted to do with my life.
So, the show ended,
I went out, stayed outside the place, just like that,
waiting for the narrator to come out and, when he did,
I straight told him: "That's what I want to do!".
As if he had to know what I was thinking.
And, well, he answered �naturally�: "What?".
And I told him: "Telling stories".
And then, he said something
that would change my life completely.
He told me: "If it is what you want, then, do it".
Which, at first,
and, by the way he said it, was like�whatever, go ahead, if you want to�
And, however, that phrase was something magical for me,
let's say it was like a formula.
From that moment,
I engaged in storytelling. First with my friends,
then I went to a bar,
then to another one,
and, soon, I found myself traveling.
And, well, in these� a little over 12 years,
I've been to many international shows,
I've been to many theatres in Europe, in America.
I've been in schools, institutes, libraries, pubs�, you name it.
To me, the most important thing is telling stories.
But, although that is my passion, I felt like something was missing.
I felt that, the stories, I wasn't telling them entirely.
Maybe it has happened to you that you hear a story and something is missing.
That's what happened to me. I had to expand, one way or another.
It was then that my brothers,
who had a creative design studio,
invited me to work with them, contributing my stories.
And, well, I accepted.
And so it was, without realizing, that I got to Multi platform narrative.
I don't know if this rings a bell.
It is nothing more than telling a story in different formats.
In other words, I would not only use words, written or spoken,
but I would now use images, I would enter the Internet,
cell phones, many formats
that were completely new to me.
So I was still telling stories,
but I was now doing it in a more complex way. And I loved it.
The first project I worked on was called "Cejas-Bravas".
For you to get the idea, it's a group of animals
that works together with the kids
to combat the adults who are completely squared
and want to destroy the world.
That is to make the story short, OK?
And, well, we created the characters in a more or less complex way,
we created a more or less complex city, we developed it all.
But what's most important to us is that educational background.
That was very important.
Thanks to this series that, as I'm telling you, has many parts,
thanks to it we were invited to participate in a cartoon forum.
I don't know If you know what they are,
they are this sort of European markets where animation is sought,
animation markets. And, well, we attended.
I don't know if you can imagine it.
Once you get there, being, like we were, a small company, a tiny company
and suddenly we were facing such a huge event,
we were emerging from a local market into an enormous one, I would say almost global,
and, of course, we thought that it was too much for us.
When we got there and heard people talking about millions of Euros
the way we would talk about getting together for coffee,
we though that it was not for us.
But suddenly people got interested,
they liked the project, they approached us,
the feedback was very positive,
and well, then, we found out that, in fact, there was something to offer,
that the stories we told were important.
No solo son esas, tambi�n estaba por ejemplo Dempsey Murray,
Sammy �El demonio�, "En transici�n",
LavaSkull. This, specifically,
is a kind of series in which we address a canarian subject, a modern one,
kind of like what Benito was saying before:
combining tradition with modernity, seeing that it's effective,
that it can be recovered
and it can be kept.
And many other things, as you can see.
if you engage in clicking in Google, you will find some,
many of them, I would say. Anyway.
But I kept feeling that it was incomplete,
like somehow that wasn't meant for me.
I thought that, well, after all
it was telling the same story in different mediums
and I found that a little dull.
And that's how we got to the transmediatic narrative or Transmedia.
I don't know if you are familiar with this term,
as I said before,
For you to get the idea I'll give you an example, OK?
Imagine Little Red Riding Hood, you all know it, right?
Yes, it's a story from our childhood,
a story that we know well,
a pretty linear story.
We have the grandmother,
Little Red Riding Hood,
the wolf
and, in some stories, we have a hunter or a woodcutter,
linear, simple.
Now forget the story completely, OK?
We forget it. Where does the story take place?
Anyone can tell me where it takes place?
Do they live in a town or in a city? What's the name of that country?
What's the weather like? Do they live in a monarchy?
Is there a group of pro-republic rebels there?
Does anyone know anything about that place, that world?
No, because the story tells us nothing at all.
Well, then, we are going to create a world, we'll call it "Perrault World",
just to make an allusion to the writer.
And, in it, we'll talk about this town, or city, which is in a country,
we'll talk about the relations between the inhabitants,
we'll talk about the whole intricate framework that exists:
climate, society, with all that this implies,
we'll talk about economy.
This city, this continent is in a world,
so, as you see, the level of complexity of this story
will only depend on the limit that we give it in our imagination.
But it doesn't stop at imagining things.
Think about the story again,
we have the characters, Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf.
Now imagine what can be done with that.
Imagine a bus, OK?
We have the bus, and we make it an offer
to become the official bus of "Perrault World"
and that's the bus that Little Red Riding Hood rides every day
to go to her grandmother's,
because, obviously, since the wolf thing, she's not allowed to walk there.
So anyone could ride that bus
and have an inversive experience in that story.
It would be a real bus,
not any bus that you can see in a picture,
we would be fully interacting with that story.
Besides,
we could create a book,
that's an autobiography of the hunter, in which we can know the person,
know that beyond all that brute force of the axes
hides a sensitive soul
that enjoys poetry and tea and cross knitting.
We could do absolutely anything,
but it doesn't stop at what we can do,
it goes even further.
We also accommodate what the fans can do.
It isn't just what we can tell,
as the director said before, it's what everybody can tell.
Everyone contributes something to that story.
The world is so rich,
that everyone can tell a story within it and it still makes sense.
We could sum up by saying
that Transmedia is telling a story
using different formats and that each format is strong in itself,
and they don't need to be experimented all together for understanding.
Well,
besides deciding to take this transmediatic narrative to all our products,
we also created a product.
A product that was developed completely, from the beginning,
with this approach. Divine.
To give you a clue,
this would be some kind of an idea, in which
God disappears, doesn't exist anymore.
The archangels are on Earth; they don't know what happens.
There are also demons living here. Nobody knows anything at all.
There is a kind of chaos, of emptyness; very briefly.
Well, to create this story,
and the same way it happens with any transmedia story,
work is done by a multidisciplinary team.
Not only did we work as the company's creative team,
but also teamed up with another company, in this case Atl�ntida Canarias.
We also worked with historians, philologists,
we worked with photographers, illustrators,
a wide group of people to be able to bring about that world.
When at last the world had been created,
we redesigned the original story for it to make sense there.
And, as you can see, it is an extremely intricate framework,
and doesn't consist only in telling stories.
Divine's idea is that world.
But as I was telling you, this complex world is told in different formats.
We have, then, the television series, live events, animation series,
we also have augmented reality games in the streets,
we are collaborating with people from New York and Berlin,
right now, to do these things.
Very many things are being done.
It's an extremely intricate framework, that takes countless working hours,
but it is telling a story, a rich story,
one that is capable of nurturing many people. Not only intellectually,
because, as you can see, it's a business.
In order to explain it
and give you an example of the transmediatic dimension of this project,
let's see this quote:
�And I saw archangels and demons appear in the world.
I saw them lost. I also saw God disappear, forget us completely.
But it was all a dream, a terrifying dream.
But not a bad dream, after all". Elio Katzenbauch
That character is a beggar,
the hero of Divine's graphic novels,
it's a character of negligible importance in other products, if he even appears.
But he has so much strength and so much to tell,
that he has a product for himself. And that experience,
that product, complements the whole ensemble and contributes a narrative richness to it all.
But, of course,
this was the first time
that we faced a non-animation project.
This was a real image project,
which was a challenge, an enriching challenge, I have to say,
because, of course, we had a lot to learn.
The first interesting thing
was how to find the people to embody our story's characters.
So we went to the social networks, mainly Facebook.
There we looked for people who were actors or actresses, or models,
because, of course, that was what Divine embodied. And we performed searches,
we located the people, we sent requests,
we talked to them, we conducted the interviews,
and in the end a really good team came together.
Everybody went for the same idea.
And we still continue to work
in order to finish its accomplishment.
As I tell you, it's a huge work.
It's considerable work. But it is about storytelling.
As I say, these extremely complex worlds
simply consist in having imagination.
Well, �simply�, only to create them.
Then, to put them into practice, also implies a lot of money and very many hours.
pero esa imaginaci�n,
But that imagination, that creativity, is in the mind, in the people.
And, luckily, here in Canarias, we have that human capital
that is needed to carry this out.
It isn't simply stories that are up in the air:
they are real stories.
Each person is capable of telling something, we are living agents of the story.
And, well, I simply want to thank you
and tell you that this team that we have
and work with will remain here, building dreams,
creating worlds and telling stories.
Thank you very much.