If the Three Little Pigs were told as a transmedia story it might be designed like this:
- The basic story would be told in an anchoring medium, such as a novel, TV show, or film.
- The wolf has a companion website would give us opportunities to learn more him, the path that led the wolf to his current antisocial tendencies, and give us a glimpse of his inner genius, such as showing his mathematical schematics of the impact of wind velocity on the materials of straw, sticks and bricks. We would also be able to find maps of the turnip field, apple tree, local market and County Fair and strategic attack positions. We would follow the wolf as he plots and adjusts his plans at each volley by the pigs.
- On a Ning network, Wolf supporters form Team Wolf and contribute strategy, information, additional maps, and alternate endings and plot developments.
- On a blog, the first little pig details the family history, his paranoid suspicions of a dark figure lurking about his house that led to the pigs decision to live apart rather than together.
- An Anime comic takes fans on the first little pig’s visions of a pig super hero saving the world and avenging evil as personified by wolves.
- The second little pig Tweets his chronicle, seeking advice on sustainable building materials and the relative merits of straw and sticks from other Twitterers, and relaying breaking news:
- @littlepig2 walls of house bowing inward, sticks flying off roof – help!
- The third little pig has a cooking series shot on location from the Stone House kitchen posted on YouTube with ways to make Parsley Turnips, Baked Apples, and Stewed Wolf Surprise. He hides clues for secret ingredients in his dishes in lyrics of songs and the YouTube trailers and encourage viewers to send in their stories about home cooking and wolf encounters to be shared on a website. He publishes a cookbook with recipes, clues to the location of the remaining house of stone, and phone numbers with changing recorded messages of cooking tips and pig gossip.
The hypothetical transmedia version of the Three Little Pigs is not the repurposing of story across different platforms. It is the creation of a holistic narrative that unfolds in different and unique manners across different media. It allows for a dialogue between creator and participant. Developers could decide if participant interaction, such as solving the sustainable materials problem, finding the wolf through clues and maps, or creating another character for the story, could move the story in different directions than the original version. Participants might urge the first little piggy to trust his instincts about the dark figure or create a hunter who steps up the stakes for the wolf and alters the time dimension of the wolf’s schemes.
Additional options might be a Three Little Pigs Kei Tai novel distributed in chapter segments to mobile devices; a geo-based iPhone app; Wolf Attack, an educational video game based on the physics concepts of construction and destruction; and development of an MMORPG.
