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.