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For the past five years, a number of SCM students have been working with some of the music world’s greatest classical composers – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Guiseppi Verdi, Gaetano Donizetti, Humperdinck, and Franz Lehar, to name a few.  How can it be that today’s students can collaborate with these long dead artists?  Thanks to a core SCM course – Transmedia Projects – students in the course have literally taken works from specific operas and created larger and more dimensional story worlds from the basic story that’s told in specific operas. Last year’s project generated some very for the Metropolitan Opera Guild.

Traditional storytelling is essentially two-dimensional and linear.  Transmedia uses different media platforms to delve deeper into the world and its character and providing the audience a much richer story world experience.

This semester, one Transmedia Projects course will be developing the story worlds for two famous operas that are part of the Metropolitan Opera’s upcoming season’s offerings – “Otello” and “La Fille du Regiment,” or “Daughter of the Regiment.”  They will be doing this by telling the audience, in this case, public school students, what is happening to the characters when they’re not in the libretto.  Character motivation, plot issues, and relationships are explored in greater detail, all aimed at helping young students to better understand what’s happening in the opera.

Specifically, the students in the class will produce a series of short one-minute animations that explore the characters, plot and story in the specific operas.  Scripts will be written, the animations will be created, and then real voices will be added. The animations will be part of the package of learning material the Guild will provide to its many participating public schools throughout the New York Metropolitan area.

In the past, the Transmedia Projects course led by Instructor Larry Weiner has created transmedia for “The Merry Widow,” “Die Fledermaus,” “Cosi Fan Tutte,” “The Magic Flute,” “The Abduction from the Seraglio,” and “The Masked Ball,” to name a few.