“It’s a trap”. Transmedia Screen-Storytelling. Dall’esperienza immersiva all’interattività partecipativa

The current narrative environment sees as protagonists of the production and distribution of content, important franchises, able to colonize the imaginary built on media representations, saturating also the conversations on social media. Think, for example, of memes, videos and UGC that have as a reference such narrative universes. In this context, it is possible to note a structural transformation of the original concept of transmedia (Jenkins 2006), in function of two variables: the circulation of stories through different media, the multiplication of the possibilities of creation and diffusion of the narrative universe by users (Scolari 2013). Such a scenario determines a new balance between producers and consumers, in relation to the dynamics of access to the fruition of the storyworld (Ryan 2014), by virtue of a multiple authorship (Wolf 2014) and a non-sequential narrative (macro-history, interstitial stories, parallel stories, peripheral stories, UGC). In the light of these changes, the paper proposes a reflection on the distribution of transmedia content through screen-based media, privileged points of entry of the narrative, thanks to its intrinsic characteristics (Lipovetsky and Serroy 2011). In particular, the case study "Star Wars", a paradigmatic example of classical transmediality and, at the same time, of evolved transmediality, is explored in depth. Through an analysis of the different productions activated starting from the acquisition of the brand by Disney, a specific parallelism between narration and screen emerges: macro-history produced for cinema, interstitial stories for cinema and television, parallel productions for television and videogames (consoles), peripheral stories for video, social platforms and videogames (consoles and apps). The analysis returns the dimension of a transmedia cultural interface (Manovich 2001) built by screens, which stands as a continuum between the immersive experience of cinema, of collective nature, and the interactive and participatory dimension given by mobile devices, of individual nature.