The Dark Art of Transmedia Storytelling

Abstract

As one of the major art movements, German Expressionism of composing unbalanced images of high contrast geometric line and shape can often be seen as a distinct visual style in cinema, animation and video game. This article focuses on this particular visual style highly influenced by German Expressionism and has a rather dark tone in form and content. The visual style of Film Noir has occupied a very important part of cinema history from the 40 s that tell sinister crime and mystery stories. Film Noir is also called Dark Cinema. This article discusses that Film Noir or its revived form Neo Noir as more than just a film and game genre. It is a visual linkage of digital content across media. As a visual narrative media, cinema has influenced many works of visual and time-based media in animation and game, which in turn also influence cinema. The worlds of Neo Noir created by computer animation and game are darker in form and content. This article also aims to enrich the decade-long debate between the narratology and ludology in game design through discussing the shared topics on world building, an important aspect of transmedia storytelling. The visual aspect of world building offers an extended perspective of Jenkins’ media convergence [1] and transmedia storytelling [2, 3], which is also about the making of a story world where timelines and side characters can be expanded and intertwined across media. This article examines this unique visual style and content in transmedia setting. It also examines the complex interrelation between visual form and content across media.