Transmedia
Cutting a Slice out of Media Pie
Cutting a Slice out of Media Pie
Multimedia
gives us a platform to make transmedia. It gives us a plethora of media outlets
to create from and share; transmedia takes the product of multimedia and
enhances it. With multimedia you get out a piece of information at a mass
productive rate through many devices. From my perspective transmedia keeps a
product created by multimedia alive and running through its way of gaining
attention from telling a new story from formats that were created already.
There
are many different facets in the media world we are able to pull new ideas from.
One of my favorite forms of Transmedia is Parody making. Parodies have become
very popular over the years; but its main source of success is taking something
well known and iconic and making it into a fun loving joke. Parody making allows
a person to dig down deep in their creative minds, and think of skits that will
become viral, in like a couple of hours.
There
are so many different avenues one can take to create a Parody; for example you
can take a famous saying and do a parody on that, you can take a movie,
commercial, talk shows, video game, and you could even do a parody on how a
celebrity acts. This is an engaging strategy, because viewers are already familiar with a piece of
work or storyline, they want to know more about it so they would actually click
on a parody for an extension of the original product.
The
successes of Parody’s today are so pronounced that even mega companies like
Pepsi use them in their commercials. One of Pepsi’s most famous commercials
is a Parody from the iconic Francis
Ford Coppola movie “The God Father”. The Movie was originally written as a book by
author Mario Puzo. The commercial consist of a little girl channeling the voice
of the Godfather himself, Marlon Brando as she orders a Pepsi from what looks
to be an Italian Restaurant. The layout of the scene in the commercial was also
a scene in The Godfather Movie, where the character Michael shoots up an
Italian restaurant. This commercial was premiered at
the 1999 Academy Awards, and people absolutely soaked it in and loved it.
This
Pepsi commercial has definitely changed the story and the audience, because it
made a serious mob flick into something humorous and lighthearted. The little
girl’s innocence in the commercial makes it lighthearted, along with the humor
of her voice as Brando. This then created a larger audience for the bad boy gangster
mob film. The audience changed from strictly adults watching it, to children
and families viewing something cute and humorous.
Today
the Movie “The God Father” has a huge following; and a plethora of transmedia
still being produced. There are several
Parodies, books,
action figures,
fan fiction pages,
blogs, and etc. This Godfather
Transmedia movement is acting much like what Henry Jenkin’s book Converegence culture was explaining
about the movie the matrix, in his chapter Searching for the Origami Unicorn.
Jenkins explains that “This is entertainment for the age of media convergence, integrating
multiple texts to create a narrative so large that it cannot be contained
within a single medium”(Jenkins 97). This quote is so factual in the sense that
we have taken The Godfather movie and adopted it into our cultural facets.
I
can only see the transmedia world for The Godfather movie only growing as the
movie gets older. People will not let this movement die off; I’m sure in years
to come they will be discoveries of a new media trend that has something to do
with our famous iconic movie.
Bibliography:
Citations:
Henry
Jenkins, 2007, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
Pepsi
Commercial- The Godfather
Parody
Research and information – On the actual movie The Godfather
Premier
of Pepsi Parody commercial- Academy Awards
Youtube-
Parodies
of The Godfather
Google Book search – Plethora
of Godfather Novels
Research on the action figures/ Ebay – Godfather action figures
FanFiction – Godfather
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