Should content move between platforms?
Avatar: The Last Air Bender (not to be confused with James Cameron’s Avatar, which came out some time ago) took a great cartoon and made it a live action 3D movie. The movie bombed by all accounts. This got me thinking, does media need to be cross platform, and should it cross platforms?
With The Last Air Bender, the underlying premise stayed the same, which in itself is pretty unique, but everything that made the show special – namely character development and world-building had to be stripped away for the sake of the new format, the movie.
Was it worth it? The damage done to the brand has made it almost impossible for me to sell people on the idea that the cartoon is worth a look? When was the last time you read the book of a horrible movie?
This begs the question, Should we attempt to recreate the same experience over multiple platforms and is such a thing even possible? The answer is yes, kinda, if we realize that the experience we are trying to recreate is the emotional response, not the physical one.
We need to figure what exactly what in the product makes it special and try to recreate that. It may look different, but the spirit – the emotional experience - of the product is still intact. Also we should realize that that different platform usually will have a different set of opportunities.
One of the issues with magazines and newspapers is that the emerging platforms themselves create wholly different expectations. Are we asking ourselves, is the purpose of the website the same purpose for the mobile application or the print article?
While I think that it is honorable to try to recreate the same physical experience to bridge the familiar with the unfamiliar, there is the hidden trap of boxing ourselves into a certain way of seeing a solution.
Think about some of the metaphors on computers – desktops, files, folders – we are stuck with those things as a consequence of trying to bridge the familiar with the unfamiliar instead of realizing that the virtual limitless space is a different animal that the finite desk space in front of us.
In the case with Avatar, the movie missed the singular fact that the show is about a bunch of kids, in a world that is changing around them, but demonstrate all the optimism, naiveté and resiliency that only kids on the threshold to adulthood have - they just happen to be able to control the elements. Make a movie about that and you’ll have a winner.
