Laura Bermejo Torres

The university as an ecosystem for creating digital storytelling: the case of the Books on screen project

Universidad Complutense de Madrid and TAI (University of Arts), Spain

In this project created so far with the students, we generate a transmedia world from the beginning. What we want to do is start from existing texts and expand and transform them to other means and channels to see how transversality works in the narrative. We choose classic books or in the public domain to work with them. In the workshop there is no strict rules, the only objective is to take these texts and “play” with them to alter their narratives. The alternatives are many: “translate” into binary language, spin-off of certain characters on social networks, imagine a web series on a stage in one of the books, create a YouTube channel of one of the protagonists, transform a written monologue in a visual poetry and show it through screens in the university, invent and recreate on a mobile the conversations of whats app that would have two characters, recreate a literary space through virtual reality … It is about creating a bridge between the old media and the new means of the digital ecosystem, natural habitat of current university students (millennials). We have re-tell stories already written but in another way.

The workshop is designed into three phases:
1.- Reading of texts and design of a transmedia architecture based on them.
2.- Materialization of the project
3.- Analysis of results

In the first of the phases, students will work with the reading and “decomposition” of the texts to expand and modify them. The second of the phases will be the practical phase, in which the ideas proposed materialize in real creations. We would like to tell in SRN the real experience of this work carried out at the TAI university. Finally, in the third of the phases the work process will be analyzed.

Academic coordinator of the Faculty of Cinematography and teacher of scriptwriting, creative writing and transmedia narrative. She has been coordinator of the web portal Abcguionistas, co-organizer of the academic program “Un Verano de Guion” and collaborator in the “Biblioautor” project, an online scriptwriting platform similar to the famous American Black List. Later, he created Quijote 360, a school and publishing house aimed at children and young people. Linked to this project, he published the Novice Literary Manual, a creative writing book for children, and the literary magazine Liteen for young authors.