The Random House Publishing Group and Blacklight Transmedia have formed a partnership to work together to create original transmedia intellectual properties as well as to coordinate the development of IP from other sources. The initiative is being handled by RHPG’s newly created division Random House Worlds, which is an IP creation and develop unit. Keith Clayton is director of creative development at RHPG, and he will be taking the lead on the Blacklight project.
According to RH, the two companies have already have begun collaboration on several projects—internal and external—with details on the individual properties to be announced soon Clayton said he hopes to have first products developed in 2012. The partnership will create and develop complete transmedia worlds, along with reference documents—living resources collating and detailing all material connected to an IP—and related documents, and will partner with authors, screenwriters, directors and media companies to develop film, television, video game, and print properties with the potential to be realized across multiple media platforms. Clayton said that different business models will be developed to correspond with where the source material comes from, adding that RH very much wants to bring authors into the RH-Blacklight "creative hub."
"We are leveraging one of Random House’s core strengths—story development—in new and exciting ways. This includes developing rich worlds ready for multiplatform implementation,” said Clayton,. “Blacklight has one of the most unique transmedia strategies in Hollywood, and our relationship with them will help to further enrich the quality of our content as we develop properties for mediums beyond the book.”
Blacklight, which was formed in 2009 under a first-look deal with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment, can develop and produce feature films, television, video games, books, comics, as well as digital media all 'in-house.”Blacklight creates content for many different media platforms simultaneously and in a self-contained fashion, allowing each property, whether it be the film, television show, video game, book, comic, or new media, to stand-alone yet be complimentary to one another.
“With this transmedia partnership we are breaking new ground in the way that content is developed and produced and we couldn’t ask for a better partner than the Random House Publishing Group,” said Zak Kadison, founder and CEO at Blacklight. “Rather than relying on pre-existing franchises, this partnership gives us the ability to work directly with those creating the best intellectual property to simultaneously create world-class content across platforms.”
