Thank God it’s Monday.

At least that’s what many of the 24 Canadian traditional and digital media producers who participated in the Merging Media Toronto 2012 conference this past Thursday and Friday (Jan. 19-20) are probably thinking, as they return to work armed with a new vocabulary and methodology for producing transmedia, and voicing its potential.

The hands-on seminar/lab backed by the Canadian Media Production Association (CMPA) was led by Anita Ondine, a UK-based digital evangelist who over two days showed participants what transmedia is, or more precisely, what she’d like it to be.

“We’ve given them a framework by setting up a development cycle, however compressed over two days, to give people the knowledge and tools to go back and rethink their existing projects and to suddenly discover they can be done as a transmedia project,” Ondine told Playback Daily on Friday.

During the lab, participants were split into two groups, the Raptors and Blue Jays, with each to develop a pitch for a transmedia experience that engages ordinary Torontonians in collaborative game-play and storytelling.

The drill, Ondine told the Raptors and Blue Jays teams, was using different skill-sets and set parameters to develop a core concept and a storytelling world.

The teams were then to build out from that core story world a transmedia production that uses at least three media platforms, is budgeted at $300,000, where the whole fabric of the user experience — no longer passive and instead participatory — is woven together.

That doesn’t mean just using the internet, Ondine added.

Transmedia is broader – video games, online communities, real-world locations, alternative reality games (ARG), flashmobs, in-store and urban scavenger hunts with clues conveyed via mobile apps and social media – to encompass anything that builds suspense and drama, and pushes a story forward to engage and entertain users and allows them to shape a story’s outcome.

“You’re not just writing a story. You’re trying to get into the minds of participants in your story world. What will be their experience?” Ondine explained.

That’s lots of pressure.

Over the next 18 hours to late Friday, the Raptors and Blue Jays teams were encouraged to think creatively and cooperatively to refine their transmedia project, and to get to the same end goal: a 10-minute pitch delivered to a five-strong jury that would determine which team best cracked the demands of a transmedia user experience.

The pressure continued to build as the rival teams moved quickly to harness disparate talents to carve out their project.

The Merging Media 2012 lab breaks new ground because it is not based on an assembly-line production approach, as are film and TV shows, where different people with different skill sets – whether content writing, production, marketing distribution — enter and step away at every stage of the process to get product made and into the market.

Transmedia, instead, should have a flat structure of creation and production, where participants in effect play together, as if in a sandbox, to launch and build up new and compelling transmedia projects.

No one platform, TV or otherwise, dominates as the participants harness varied talents and ideas to create story world in which consumers can actively participate.

That created a lot of pressure for lab participants because there were no clear-cut answers to questions raised in the lab.

Mentors Alan Sawyer of Changing Channels Entertainment and Jay Bennett of Smokebomb Entertainment, and Ondine, were on hand to steer the lab participants in the right direction.

But for the most part, everyone scrambled in the dark for solutions on how to develop new storytelling tools and techniques across multiple platforms that contribute to a user’s understanding of, and engagement in, a story world.

Working well into the night on Thursday, and through Friday morning, the Blue Jays team fleshed out a transmedia story world that uses the upcoming 2015 Pan Games as a backdrop, and has a narrative where three people from Pan Am countries are brought to Toronto, experience the city as scouts, and report back to the world on what a diverse Canada they’ve witnessed.

Against the same clock, the Raptors team busily developed a rival story world experience, one where a mysterious virus on the internet hijacks Facebook and erases profiles and challenges Torontonians to rebuild online identities and understand each other within 30 days, or destruction will ensue.

There were lots of highs and lows as each team conceived a transmedia project that some participants believe can eventually be rolled out in the real-world market, while others called on their colleagues to focus and make key decisions to meet the next Merging Media lab deadline.

Meanwhile, Ondine was slyly telling the teams that now might be a good time to produce an online video, or arrange actors for an ARG, to kick up their eventual pitch to the jury.

Lots of pressure, and an affront to business-as-usual players in the Canadian film and TV industry.

This is the future, Ondine told the lab, as she painted a picture of traditional broadcasting as a sunset industry that won’t cut it in the 21^st century, and will inevitably be replaced by cross-platform programming.

That means Canadian producers will eventually be compelled to transcend traditional silos and storytelling that they know from traditional film and TV production.

“To me transmedia is about telling a story. At the core of it, it is a story, or many stories, that take place across multiple screens,” Ondine said of content hurdling borders and boundaries to reach new audiences.

Transmedia is also about those same audiences moving from passive consumption in a cinema or in front of their TV sets to participation and interactivity, the lab is told.

And cross-platform production means producers giving the digital audience ever more control of the story world being built and rolled out as they go in search of what content they want, and where and when they want it.

“We don’t know all of the things that can possibly happen, because when someone enters that story world, they become characters in that story, they enter into the shoes of the protagonists,” Ondine said.

Lots of pressure for the Raptors and Blue Jays teams.

But Canadian digital producers know all about pressure, and defying it.

They work in a digital business dominated by broadcasters at home and U.S. giants like Google and Apple globally.

The dilemma for producers eyeing digital extensions lower down on the Canadian food chain is whether or not they need a pre-sale to a broadcaster to trigger fund money, especially from the CMF’s convergent stream, or should they go it alone.

Those same broadcasters want to own the digital rights, and any transmedia content to live on their website to retain control.

That in turn hampers an indie producer’s ability to exploit international rights for digital content.

If a Canadian producer were to decide whether to develop and produce a digital product based on where they can secure Canadian funding and at the same time retain rights and control, they’d likely get out of the game.

But Canadian digital producers don’t give up, knowing if they can simplify the transmedia experience for users, while offering a broadcaster an audience and demo they covet, it can be a worthwhile endeavour for all parties.

So how to develop and offer broadcasters a one-click experience for users that will engage and keep their attention, and represent an audience and demo they’re targeting, to get a producer on their way in transmedia?

That question Playback Daily will explore, and answer, in Part 2.