Story Lab [part 13]: Project B3 – Initial Reflection

Our transmedia project, ‘The Barlow Enquiry’ is an interactive transmedia story which will utilise elements of the ARG (Alternate Reality Game) platform to engage and involve audiences in a detailed crime-mystery narrative.

Our story follows Atticus Barlow, a man in his 20s who discovers that one of his great ancestors was murdered and that his killer was never found. Atticus becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of the unknown murderer, and documents his investigations online.

The audience will be invited to interact with Atticus through a range of online social-media platforms, including a blog, Twitter and Facebook page. In this way, the audience will be able to partake in the story, joining Atticus as he sorts through old documents, police reports and photographic evidence. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to create a narrative that will suck people in, and get audience members to actively partake in the discovery of information.

While we’re still in the early stages of development, it’s been exciting to see the story begin to take shape. At the moment we’re still trying to figure out the logistics of what we want to achieve, and I think this is important when working on such an expansive and intertwining project. It has quickly become clear that this type of narrative project needs to be planned very precisely, and executed in an extremely organised manner.

My role at the moment involves a bit of everything. I’ve been helping write the story and create the characters, however my primary role once we flesh out the narrative will be to design and organise the release structure & schedule for our story AND to produce a range of audio/visual content for our online platforms. The release schedule will form a significant part of our final product, and it’ll be crucial to get this aspect of the ‘pre-production’ just right.

When initially discussing our idea, I mentioned that I’d like to try and create a ‘real-world’ aspect to our interactive narrative – possibly through the use of real-world discoverable objects/documents or a scavenger-hunt-esque activity. I’m currently brainstorming a number of ways to achieve this goal, and I expect this component of our project will take up quite a bit of my time. I hope that by working on this area I’ll learn more about the different ways audiences can be engaged and the methods through which interactivity can be fostered in today’s online environment.

Through working on this project I also hope to gain a stronger and more detailed understanding of the processes involved in creating transmedia/multi-platform narratives. Because I’ve never worked on anything like this before, it’s hard to anticipate where we’ll end up and how the end product will be received by the general audience. However, the fact that this is something completely new is pretty exciting and it’ll definitely benefit my creative storytelling skills in the long run.

I’m interested in pursuing a career in games and interactive storytelling, so this project will definitely help me develop a greater understanding of precisely what is involved in this field of work.

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