The interactive and transmedia documentary. Approach, state of development and case analysis in the Spanish area

Abstract

This study introduces a theoretical approach to the emerging genre of the interactive and transmedia documentary. A provisional definition of the term, its characterization and its current state of development are studied in order to analyze three significant projects produced in recent years in the Spanish area: Guernica, pintura de guerra (CCRTV and Haiku Media, 2007), Las voces de la memoria (Barret Films and Asociación de Familiares de Alzheimer de Valencia, 2011) and MetamentalDOC (Blasco et al., 2010). Guernica, pintura de guerra is one of the pioneering interactive documentaries produced in Spain; Las voces de la memoria is a multi-platform documentary project about Alzheimer’s disease and music therapy explored through various elements, and MetamentalDOC is a web platform that contains an interactive documentary about the documentary genre and authored documentary. These projects use different thematics, platforms, user experiences and strategies, offering some clues to how the transmedia documentary, the next stage in the documentary narrative, works.

KEYWORDS: documentary genre, digital media, interactive documentary, transmedia, webdocs, transmedia documentary.