By Msanaa Bosland, Jack Hughes, and Rayna Johnson
Gravity Falls was an animated show that aired on Disney Channel and Disney XD from June 2012 to February 2016. The show's plot was contained to only two seasons and was generally deemed a quirky kids show by critics; however, among audiences Gravity Falls developed a reputation for hiding various codes, cryptograms, and hidden messages in its episodes for fans to discover. This aspect of the show fueled large amounts of audience participation, as a strong fandom community worked together to solve these puzzles. Gravity Falls would also become a much more typical trans-media after the ending of the show, with over forty physical books and a video game for the Nintendo 3DS being released as part of the extended canon of the show. However, the crown jewel of Gravity Falls trans-media nature was the international treasure hunt orchestrated by show creator and executive producer Alex Hirsch, which started in St. Petersburg, Russia and led fans, through a series of codes and ciphers, to Japan and several disparate cities in the U.S. culminating in the discovery of a statue of the show's main antagonist, Bill Cipher, hidden in the woods around Reedsport Oregon.
The actual plot of Gravity Falls follows a pair of thirteen year old teens who are sent to spend the summer with their ‘Grunkle’ Stan, who runs a tourist trap in upstate Oregon called the Mystery Shack. The twins, Mabel and Dipper Pines, spend the summer unraveling the supernatural activities that are exceptionally prevalent around the town of Gravity Falls. The plot mainly revolves around a set of journals that document the unnatural aspects of the town and the mystery of their origin; these journals would also be later published as part of the trans-media nature of the show. The series culminates in a three-episode special titled “Weirdmageddon" which sees the town taken over by Bill Cipher, a multidimensional creature of chaos in the shape of a one-eyed yellow triangle complete with bowtie and tophat. The finale of the show contained a single real-life image of this character with an encoded riddle that hinted to a treasure in the woods, this would serve as the inciting incident for the ensuing scavenger hunt.
The “Cipher Hunt” was an alternate reality game, which involved committed fans exploring real world locations to find clues towards the next location in the game, like a cross between a scavenger hunt and geo-caching. However, this scavenger hunt was more entwined with the show and the creator, who regularly corresponded with the participating fans through social media. The hunt consisted of twelve clues hidden in different major cities, beginning in St. Petersburg, Russia the clues led to Tokyo, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Santa Clarita, Piedmont, back to Los Angeles, Portland, Piercy, Amity, Turner, and finished in Reedsport, Oregon with the discovery of the roughly four foot tall statue of Bill Cipher and a chest containing some paraphernalia from Alex Hirsch and some currency left by an individual who discovered the statue a month before the hunt began.
The hunt suffered from several setbacks that showcase both the weakness and strengths of this type of trans-media. Specifically, there were several times throughout the hunt where clues, or as said the final prize, was found and disturbed by people not participating in the hunt. For instance, the fourth clue in the order was originally located on the campus of Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, however, university staff accidentally disposed of said clue before it could be discovered by fans. In response to this, the creator tweeted to let fans know that that clue was missing, and later tweeted a phone number which led to the fifth clue once decoded. In the case of the final statue, Alex Hirsch was informed by one of the fans that the person who discovered it before the beginning of the hunt had posted an image of it to a subreddit, and subsequently had to pay the individual a hundred dollars and promise credit for the discovery if they took down the post. This type of trans-media storytelling is fairly different from the ones we have explored in class up to this point; however, the interaction between creator, fans, and participates in the hunt is an extremely unique way to utilize trans-media as a method to expand the story of Gravity Falls through the participation of people in the real world and on social media.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWe are the students of "Digital Literatures" at Millikin University. These are some of the digital narratives that entice, inspire, and challenge us. Categories
All
Archives
April 2024
|