Few call it transmedia anymore, but content creators everywhere are increasingly building fictional storyworlds to engage audiences across multiple platforms.

For broadcasters struggling to make their content stand out in an over-saturated media space, the space is especially alluring.

The desire to generate a second screen conversation about SundanceTV’s crime thriller The Red Road brought SundanceTV’s Drew Pisarra to the Merged Media5 conference in Vancouver last week to brainstorm with local creators.

The first season of the series secured a small army of fans over its first season of six episodes in February and March 2014, ahead of catch-up viewing on Netflix. Now Pisarra needs to keep the conversation going with new digital extension to bridge the gap between the first and upcoming second season in 2015.

So the SundanceTV VP of digital media and marketing came to Vancouver to launch the inaugural Digital Extensions Story Lab. Over two days, 16 Canadian digital artists worked in four teams to create online stories spun off from the cable drama about a fictional New Jersey town and its adjoining Native American community.

“It’s about engagement [and] causing some noise. It’s about securing attention in a crowded marketplace. What can we do that will be buzz-worthy on some level?” Pisarra asked the Story Lab participants as they received their creative brief on the opening Wednesday morning.

The goal was to drive viewership for second season by engaging The Red Road audience, no matter where it came from, when the show disappears on between seasons.

“That’s the big question. Where does [the audience] live? In my mind, I’m trying to expand the fan base for the show, whether on Netflix or on the Sundance site,” Pisarra explained. “It’s really about getting them in. Can we get them into the show, regardless of how they first watched it, so they will come to SundanceTV for the second season?” he added.

In return for their digital-story-centric visions, the participants learned the latest tips and tools to build successful digital storyworlds, using next-generation technology, social media, monetization strategies and cross-platform storytelling tropes.

Leading the workshop was Alison Norrington, founder and CEO of Storycentral, a London-based entertainment studio that incubates, develops and grows storyworlds and cross-media properties.

“We’re taking the model of a ‘hackathon,’ but there’s a tangible project to work around, real IP with real parameters, with challenges on what they can or can’t do with a show,” she tells Playback Daily about her leadership role at the Story Lab.

Despite not having to work with a fictitious project or storyworld, there’s still real obstacles to the Story Lab participants effectively extending the shelf life for The Red Road in a digital story experience across multiple platforms and formats.

Most participants don’t know one another, having just met, and never worked as teams before. They’re a diverse lot – digital storytellers, techies, social media experts – all coming together to design a digitally interactive extension to keep Red Road fans engaged. They only received their creative brief a day before, with some having yet to screen all six episodes of The Red Road before starting work.

That said, they had a lot to work with. The Red Road revolves around a conflict between a small Native American tribe, so there were native mythologies to inform the storytelling. The conflict escalates when a young Native American boy is in a hit-and-run accident the police can’t solve, so a mystery hook for the cross-platform emerges.

What’s more, series star Jason Momoa starred in HBO’s Game of Thrones as the ill-fated Khal Drogo, so there’s a fan base to draw on.

This may be TV, but Pisarra wants the Story Lab to deliver digital content for the future, content that’s shareable and reusable, that invites The Red Road fans use technology and interactivity to become part of the storyworld, and even to converse with series talent and creators.

“Content needs to be shared and tap into the dark aspects so it’s worthy of conversation outside of the click. We want it to incite discussion,” he adds.

Here a story lab where the prototyping of a digital storyworld that may take as much as six months to complete is done in two days is nearer to reality than most participants may assume.

“The reality is I started at Sundance the day before The Red Road premiered, so this is actually a simulation of reality, and not a concentrated version of it,” Pisarra explained.

Why had Pisarra chosen The Red Road for the Canadian story lab?

First of all, the SundanceTV property is its most socially engaged show, with research Pisarra commissioned showing that compared to Space’s Orphan Black, which airs stateside on BBC America, The Red Road was slower to build an audience online. But the size of the series’ hard-core fans is proportionally higher than that of the Canadian clone drama.

“We weren’t just trying to get likes on Twitter and Facebook. We’re saying, if you love it, come here. The chances of them sharing are proportionally much greater,” Pisarra said of fans of The Red Road.

Just before the Story Lab members were unleashed to brainstorm, Norrington cautioned them to think closely about their audience, and whether they will react to the technological and creative cues in their storyworld.

“What do you want your audience to do, and will they do it? You might think you have a great idea, but why would the audience care and do as you wish?” she offered.

In the second part of the three-part series, Playback will explore how the competing teams go about creating a digital spin-off story for The Red Road that goes beyond apps and tweets to effectively reward loyal fans with new and unique content that shareable and mobile and which they can’t get anywhere else.

– Photo via Linkedin