Don’t emulate TV: Hoodlum

Nathan Mayfield, co-founder of Emmy-winning Brisbane-based transmedia company Hoodlum, warns screen creatives not to emulate TV formats and storytelling when working on cross-platform projects.

“Don’t try to emulate TV across those platforms, but emulate audience behaviour. Using your storytelling skills, how do you tell those stories in the way that people use that technology? What does a story look like if it’s told not on television, but online, using social media, iPhone apps, Facebook?” Mayfield told Encore.

Mayfield is one of Australia’s most successful transmedia storytellers, and an advocate for the use of cross-platform to extend a project and its audience – participating at events like the recent X Media Lab: Film Extended in Melbourne.

Hoodlum was established in 1999, and it was the work done for British broadcasters (Spooks for the BBC, Emmerdale for ITV) that gave the company the international notoriety that led to big projects in the US, for ABC’s series Lost and Flash Forward.