The BBC are building a mythology engine. What a great name. Kinda surprised they didn’t call it the iDigger or some such shit:

The R&D Prototyping team has recently built an internal prototype for BBC Vision called the Mythology Engine. It’s a proof-of-concept for a website that represents BBC drama on the web letting you explore our dramas, catch up on story-lines, discover new characters and share what you find.

One to watch this. The iPlayer sounded exciting for a while and then the BBC fumbled the birth/abortion and we ended up with bucketware (they keep emptying it for us).

Doctor Who is the obvious choice for a prototype – if anything it’s too rich a vein to tap. I can see it getting picked apart ruthlessly when they open it to the public, but it’ll be interesting to see how the bells and whistles here stack up against the mostly text driven wikipedia entries. And what happens when they start digging into shows that are less well documented and (hopefully) have a pop at expanding this framework to news. Of course, for this to get really interesting it needs to be bolted on to the actual content itself at the point we consume it.

My real interest here though is fictional archeology. Something I’ve been thinking about since I first started talking iPhone apps with Sleepydog and began working out the backstory of Slingers (I can give you a timeline for the show that runs from 2020 to 2267, but the bit you’re concerned with kicks off in 2263). In fact we now have a couple of physical artifacts from that future’s history:

But I can’t talk about that just now.

All the cool stuff I have currently loaded onto my iPad are surface applications. They allow me to experience media in a handy, shiny format, but they don’t let me dig too deep. If you ever read Warren’s Fell on its original run you’ll have seen he stuffed the thing with back material (preliminary sketches and information on the real world incidents that inspired some of the comic’s content). Now imagine that on an iPad. The Marvel style interface is very cool, but what I’d like to see is a secondary series of gestures that allow me to peel back the panels. I want to see the original art work, the pencil drawings etc, but also the history of the story.

Enhanced editions of novels are doing a wonderful job here too. But so far whether it’s a novel or a TV show the glop attached to the content are secondary to the content itself.

Keep an eye on Blacklight to watch this kind of transmedia evolve. I sat down with them in LA earlier in the year and they have some very cool stuff in the pipeline. And then there’s Jesse Alexander’s Day One.

Though Day One’s prime time adventures are simple and compelling, its mythology is vast and designed to be experienced across multiple media platforms. A new kind of transmedia epic.

We’re getting to the point now where if you watch this kind of stuff on the right device you’ll be able to do the lean back experience as before, but leaning into the device should give you vertigo.

Of course, we still have to get the story telling part right, but thinking about this stuff up front actually helps build a much richer writing experience and you can avoid the kind of post-it note crap that has me reaching for the bottle, mumbling about fucking ‘star whales‘.