Recently I’m totally hooked on something called KAGEROU PROJECT! And it’s an interesting example for how different media can be used centering around one story.
The kind of media mix (not transmedia in its true meaning) used in Kagerou Project is already well known from other projects. In his talk at the Cartoon Museum in Basel on September 1st, Prof. Dr. Bernd Dolle-Weinkauff called it the media alliance, which is a cascade like structure showing how a story runs through different media formats in a set order. It usually starts with a manga, since it costs the least and offers a platform to see how the story works with an audience. If it proved successful, it can be adopted as a OVA first on a small market or directly as a TV series. If those were popular enough, a feature film often follows. There are other cases where TV series get adopted as a manga, too. It seems to me that the Japanese (market?) wants to enjoy a story in all it’s formats.
Games are an other common source for TV series and at least since the great success of THE MELANCHOLY OF HARUHI SUZUMIYA, light novels are a powerful member of that league, too, to the extent that some people start groaning: “Not another of those light-novel-adaption type anime!”
What is unusual about KAGEROU PROJECT is that is started with songs by Jin (a.k.a. Shizen no Teki-P) using vocaloid voices (mostly IA) but using original characters in the PVs produced by Shidu and Wannyanpu. And most importantly, with his songs Jin created a story and a whole universe that got adapted into a manga and a light novel series and a TV series has been announced as well which is to be produced by studio Shaft and directed by Akiyuki Shinbo (my absolutely favorite combination, so I’m almost going crazy!!!).
The links to the official site below:
I was surprised when I found out that there is an other project with almost the same CV: DEMISE PROJECT also started as a song series by 150P, picking up urban legends and shaping them into songs also using vacaloid voices. And it also got adapted into a novel and a manga.
Are these projects laying out the blueprint for how stories will be developed and produced in the future?