The creation of a universe to extend a “single IP” into “IP franchises”
The development of an effective merchandising umbrella above the film company.
Note: For confidentiality purposes, the company’s name shall not be disclosed. The case study illustrates a project proposal to a film company, which didn’t come to terms. The film company is an international movie maker categorized as one of the leaders in the entertainment industry in china, making the headlines in Forbes Asia’s best 200 under a billion (publication ranking 2016).
The project came to light early May 2017, which had as objective to develop an attractive universe around the film company’s existing portfolio and IPs and devise a subsequent transmedia strategy with a long-term vision of creating future derived IPs.
After extensive market and data research, we created a deep-rooted universe into the Chinese cultural aspects. Proposing a set of two distinctive thematic: one; an architecturally opulent and modern city and second; a dark lugubrious forest. To illustrate the viable potentials of such a universe, we developed three stories and a consequent transmedia strategy to be implemented in the most effective way and dispersed via social media, comics and films.
With the aid of intelligent social web crawling tools we have been able to understand the real targeted audience of the IP and their habits. More precisely we could identify when and where that particular audience were most frequently seen online as well as offline. We also studied their expectations in terms of content and daily consumption thus endorsing a meticulous and extremely accurate transmedia strategy.
Based on an eclectic and a very extensive mood board alongside a protracted copywriting process, we shaped a well-documented universe. With this guidebook in hands our team of copywriters and illustrators created a set of three storyboards that were key to social media, comics, content creations and potentially movies.