Story Lab – Week 8

Reflecting on our presentation.

This week we “pitched” our idea to a panel including Dan, Ben Mckenzie from last weeks lecture and another women involved in media/games who’s name I sadly forgot.

I think our presentation went quite well, and we definitely received a great reaction to our trailer. The feedback we were given was interesting and helpful, for example taking care to treat loaded words/concepts with care and recognising that they have large amounts of baggage associated with them.

I cant speak for Olivia or Alex, but my upbringing was almost entirely un-religious and my entire knowledge of Christianity (and all religion really) comes from Pop-Culture. So the pre-established weight and baggage associated with words such “sin” is lost on me.

Although, I think we are still going to have that as a concept and core part of our Cult’s ideology, but we will make sure we carefully outline what our “sin” is, so confusion is less likely to occur.

We also got to watch other people’s presentations, which was fascinating and all of the group’s ideas were very diverse and interesting, the “Old-timey murder one” (again, I sadly forgot the name) particulry, because I love the athestic and “feel” of that era in fiction, and the stuff they are doing with fake newspapers was really cool.

Story Lab – Major Project 500 Blog Post

My major project for Story Lab is a group project with Alex and Olivia contracting an interactive narrative that is a cross between a movie and a choose your own adventure story that will also be accompanied with some real life elements.

Its working title is “ProjYct e-VOLOLUTION” and follows the same formula used by games and “choose-your-own-adventure” books, in which the audiance assumes the role of a nameless, backstoryless character that represents them, throughout the story the audiance is asked to make many desiscions as if they were in the world of the narrative, which affects how the story plays out. In addition to the main story, which is told through Power Point, the narrative will be supported by several real-world elements such as pamphlets (which act as the starting point of the story, and hold more information that the audiance will need later on) and other objects, such as posters, documents etc… that will flesh out the world of our story and even tell other stories that may be running in tangent with the “player” character.

Our story is about a cult, which shares its name with our assessment title, that is dedicated to ascending humanity to the next form of evoloution: a purely digital existence. There also exists an organisation dedicated to stopping the cult from achieving these goals, believing them to be nothing but delusional idiots on a crash course to accidental mass suicide. The person “playing” our story must choose which side to ally with, which hugely impacts the conflict between these two factions, as well as having agency over how the main-character goes about and reacts to the various scenarios encountered throughout the story.

This story idea has had a strange development process, it was born out of none of us being truly gripped with the idea of any of the other options available so we mashed together some of our existing “half-idea’s” and started our own group. Since then it underwent numerous changes and now shares very little with our original idea. Our project is VERY different to how I initally envisioned it, but I am very happy with where we are now, and each group member has had a large impact in developing the idea’s.

One of the biggest challenges of making this project (and one of the things I’m most looking forward to) is the branching narrative paths, planning them all out has been a tough process as a group, and actually making them is going to be even harder, and it seems like making the hyperlink “skeleton” has become my task due to it being my idea to use powerpoint and assuring the group I knew how to do it.

The actual content that goes on these slides is going to be a group effort from all of us, and each of us will likely end up writing the exact narrative and acting as characters in the story, as well as producing all the media (digital and physical) for the Project, but exact tasks for each of us haven’t been decided yet.

I feel this project is quite ambitious in the amount of content we are aiming to create, but most certainly doable, and I am very excited to see where it goes.

 

Here is the trailer for our project, which offers an insight into the cult.

Story Lab – Week 7

This week we had a guest Lecturer, Ben Mckenzie, who was from “Pop Up Playground” and a creator of real-life games with a focus on emmergent narrative. He talked extensively about how to construct these types of stories, which I found fascinating.

The issues such as making sure its easily accessible and doesn’t demand too much of an audience were interesting to think about, and dealing with the uniqueness of the audiance being given large amounts of agency and nothing to stop them from doing things not originally considered part of the story and adapting to it on the fly.

The planning stage of “True Romans All” was very similar to our own Story Lab project, with the branchng paths and multiple endings. Except that there’s allowed for much more audiance freedom to break away from the pre-structured story and do their own thing, while ours is contrained to the paths we create. I think the idea of every descion being a group vote was a very clever way of giving ageency to a large participatory audiance while also being simple and easy to understand, and staying relevent to the story.

Another issue that I thought of was that differed between Pop Up Playground’s stories and our own, was that despite the apprent similarities there is a fundemental difference in that ours can be preserved. The file containing the “choose your own adventure” will be reuseable forever, and anyone can be given the physical documents to examine, wheras something like “True Romans All” or the upcoming  “$mall time Criminal$” can only exist as long as Pop Up Playground runs the event can never be experienced again.

This is an interesting concept for me, as I have always admired and appricated art/stories that have no experiation date and disliked things that will one-day become unuseable (for example Video Games with an arbitary always-online connection that will one day be turned off, rendering it useless). This philosphy partially influenced my imput into designing our Story Lab project. But the things Ben Mckenzie talked about were unique story experiences which can ONLY work as one-time things. It didnt change my opinion on peices of media that will one-day become defunct (especially if there is no reason other than publisher control), but it did make me appreciate that “one time only” story’s can be appealing and utilise the advanatages of relying on contiued involvment from the creators, and audiance, to exist.

It was a very interesting lecture, and I would love to experience one of there things for myself.

Story Lab – Week 6

This week we looked at a variety of webseries including High Maintaince, The Guild and Starting from Now, and thought up hyperthetical transmedia stories that could be told expanding on these stories.

I found it quite difficult to think of any that were not contrived at best, or shameless marketing/tie-ins at worst, since the webseries were not really suited for expansion into a multi-thread story across different platforms. Ideas that we came up with included:

  • A feature length film about the Weed Guy from High Maintenance, that follows his adventures as he pops in and out of other stories in progress and without proper context, the opposite of the show.
  • Flesh out the Cult from the episode of High Maintainance and fully construct the website, perhaps using discussion forums to expand on the story of the guy from that episode.

These idea’s wernt terrible and might be interesting to engage with, but the problem was that they felt contrived and unnecessary, and showing too much backstory can indeed tarnish the original stories. I think this exercise goes to show the importance of planning for transmedia, expanding on something that was never intended to be expanded upon is very difficult, whereas if a story is planned to have multiple platforms and narrative threads at its inception (for example the MCU) then it can work very well.

 

 

All my stuff in one place

By popular (Hey Georgie!) demand here is all my videos for Uni in one location.

 

O.R.B: Operation Retrieve Briefcase

Front Cover

O.R.B Front Cover

Back Cover

O.R.B back cover (image)

The Feature Film

The Trailer

Behind the Scenes: HeadSplosion (TURN VOLUME UP, it was recorded at 2:00am and I was trying not to be heard by my neighbours)

Behind the Scenes: Rhyming Narration (again TURN VOLUME UP!)

Blooper Reel

 

 

Media Self Portrait

Media Portrait about someone else

 

A couple videogame related videos (mostly Bloodborne)

 

Some random Gif’s I made for various internet forums.

(you probably wont get them at all, but they are still here)

 

(dont ask)