In this week of Story Lab we looked at the Marvel Cinematic Universe as an example of a transmedia story with a (near) limitless budget.

As an activity we had to try and map it out and show how each different part connected with the rest of the cinematic universe. Here is the diagram that we drew:

One interesting aspect that we looked at was how despite the MCU seemingly being made up of multiple sub-series (EG Iron Man 1-3, Captain America 1, 2 and Civil War, Thor 1 & 2 etc…) the “2’s” were not nesisarily sequels to the “1’s” and just watching all a of particular set would likely leave the viewer confused and missing vital plot elements. Iron Man 3 and Captain America 2 are not follow-ups to thier numerical predecessors, but rather direct sequels to The Avengers, which in turn relied on all the prior films to make sense. In this sense the MCU isnt really a collection of series, it is instead one mega-series of films.

We also observed the power-levels of influence, the MCU is made up of films and TV shows, but they are far from equal. The films dictate the direction of the universe and the TV shows have to follow, the reverse has never happened. For example in Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier, the organisation S.H.E.I.L.D  is revealed to be controlled by thier enemy HYDRA and the established organisation is destroyed, the TV show “Agents of Shield” followed this and in the episode that aired the weekend of Winter Soliders cinematic release these events were shown to be happening, vasting changing the show.  But so far the opposite has never happened, an event in one of the TV shows has yet to have major ramifications for the next film release.

This is because Marvel expects everyone who watches the shows to keep up with the films, but doesnt expect everyone who watches the films to keep up with the TV shows.

In this week of Story Lab we did an activity called “Story Smash” in which we had to take our own ideas for a story and somehow combine them into a single universe.

The idea’s that had to be combined were

• A  film student director making a film about an amateur director making a film about a indie film director making a film about a big name Hollywood director making a film. With the original director and thier associates playing the starring roles in each film where they assume vastly different relationships and personalities. Eventually driven to insanity by being unable to tell which “layer” they are on at any one point.
• Someone with access to another person”s (who died) computer and all the persona files/photgrpahghs etc.. and peicing together what type of person they would have been and how it differed from they’re actual life.

Combining these wasn’t too difficult and the easiest and most obvious way was to make the person being profiled by their computer files be the director. The person piecing the different files, images and video’s together would also have to deal with the complexity of the 4 layers of films the director was making, possibly even having to finish the film if all the parts were never edited together and the director died before finishing it.

This idea will most likely not be used for the major Project Brief this semester, but it was intersting and fun to think up all the different scenario’s and how the two stories could be combined as well as applying transmedia applications.

In this weeks classes we worked on reading and critiquing other peoples short stories. The thought of someone reading mine mine was fairly daunting, especially since I wasnt entirely happy with it myself and never would have shared it if it wasn’t a Uni assignment.

On the other hand reading someone else’s (in my case Griffen’s short story) was interesting, and gaining an insight into other people’s creative process is fascinating and insightful. It also served to heighten my anxiety about someone reading mine, because her’s was so good and I was worried that if everyone wrote stuff similar to that, mine would stand out.

But luckily my fears did not amount to anything because the person who read and critiqued my short story was Jeremy Costa, who gave me an reassuring thumbs-up in class and later wrote a comment on my blog.

His comment was enthusiastic and very positive of my short story, he “got it” so to speak. It was interesting to see his interpretations of my short story, and served as an example how vauge elements can be read wildly different by different people. Especially since I was focused so much on keeping to the word limit, and drawing on the readings trying to limit exposition.

Despite my fear to submit it for others to read, it would also be fascinating to see the assumptions made by multiple people about certain story elements and how they compare to my original vision.

First things first, I’m glad that this assessment is worth 0% of the final grade.

Knowing that, I decided to take some risks with this story that I might no otherwise have taken, and was very ambitious in my ideas, something that I feel did not pull off very well, thus: the first thing.

The world of my story is part of a much larger set of ideas inside my head that have slowly become more and more refined over time. I wanted to put these ideas to paper, and utilise the stuff we talked about in Week 1 to make a short story that was quite obviously missing context but still be understandable and spark the readers imagination rather than confuse them. I wanted to put in as few details as possible, but still paint a somewhat defined picture in the readers minds. The 800 word limit meant that I had to cut almost every idea I had, originally the bulk of the story was meant to be the final conversation, and I planned several topics of conversation but each one was 500+ words long. But unfortunately the basic setup (of which another several paragraphs were culled) ended up taking most of my words.

As I said in Week 1’s blog post, I wanted to explore the shock or twist ending and the Grand Magistor falling off the balcony of his own volition was the foundation of the story, and infact the final paragraph was the first one I wrote. However the impact of the ending was greatly diminished by the wordcount neutering the “cleverness” of the story (I had planned a conversation about the concept of discipline and how the stewards knew exactly how many seconds it took to climb the tower).

I would love to revisit this story unshackled and write it how I originally envisioned.

This week in Story Lab we looked at a variety of issues surrounding story, a major point being linearity as the “standard” or “default” way to construct a story and alternate ways it could be done. Another topic raised in one of the readings was “Database as a story”, I didnt fully understand this and I may be misinterpertting it, but these two things (and even the stuff about agency in the other reading) immidetly made me think of From Software’s “Soul’s” games (and Bloodborne).

These video games which include Demon’s Souls (2009), Dark Souls (2011), Dark Souls 2 (2014) and Bloodborne (2015), and are infamous for their legendary difficulty (which in my opinion is vastly overstated) but also have a unique narrative style that delivers their dark and twisted fantasy stories in a very data-base style method.

The plot of the game’s is very simple, in Demon’s Souls you are simply tasked with killing Demons until you are powerful enough to lull the Old One back to Slumber and save the kingdom of Bolataria. In Dark Souls you are tasked with ringing the Two Bells of Awakening, and then collecting 4 powerful Souls for a Snake that looks like Steve Buscemi and then either lighting yourself on fire to serve as 1000 years of fuel for the world or no lighting yourself on fire and letting the world be consumed by darkness.

Relatively simple plots which act mostly as reasons to complete the gameplay objectives (killing each Arch Demon, or finding both Bells of Awakening etc…) but the games contain vast amounts of story and lore that explains the history of the world, who characters you meet are and WHY you are completing your simple, yet vague objectives.

This story is not intrusive in any way, and a player could quite easily finish the game without knowing who anyone was or why they were there, but if you care to look for it a rich backstory for almost everything you can find is there, in various degree’s of obsecrerity.

Every item you find in the game (Weapons, Spells, Keys, Clothing etc…) has a description when viewed in the games inventory screen, usually explaining what the item is and what it does, but it often is accompanied with more information that expands on the story, giving insight onto events or characters.

This item from Bloodborne gives a short summary of events that took place that the player has no other way of figuring out, and gives a clearing understanding of what happened to the Fishing Villiage it is found in. Items which contain “lore” are scattered all over the game(s) and to understand who people are, what happened in the past and more. Once picked up all this infomation can be viewed at one’s lesiure from the Inventory menu, but the order in which a player finds them can vary wildly, as a player you can tackle different areas of the game non-linarly, thus certain items will be found in a certain order which could temporarily lead to an interpretation of events that gets revised when more infomation is found, or a player could miss an item entirely and never read that infomation (or just forget to read it after picking it up). This means that different people might have different interpretations of events in the story because they dont have the full picture.

The story becomes almost an encyclopedia of fictional items and events, and if a player wants a cohesive narratitive and a linear timeline of events they must connect the various “passages” together as well as taking into account what characters say, and enviromental/visual cues.

The story in these games is equivalent to learning human history via reading a part of a wikipedia article every time you found something you hadn’t seen before, once you’ve found everything all the infomation is there and organised neatly into a database of sorts, but its a format that is (at least intially) odd for a work of fiction.

Here is an example of someone giving their interpretation of part of the story, gathering the clues from the “database” that is the inventory of items.

Maybe I completly misunderstood what that reading meant by Database as Story, but I still think its a very interesting way of delivering narrative.

After the first week of Story Lab’ing we discussed many aspects of what a story is, and the elements that make them up. With a particular focus on short stories, looking at both Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” as an example and Brander Mattew’s “Philosopshy of the Short Story” as a text to examine them as a way of writing and how they differ from a traditional novel sized text.

One aspect that we touched on in class was [INSERT FRENCH WORD HERE], a french word meaning “flourish at the end” and how short stories often manage to pull off a satisfying ending more often and better than longer types of storytelling.

I agree with this, and upon reflection found that almost every short story I have ever read ended on either some grand reveal (often incredibly dark or twisted) or something else equally as likely to snap the reader back to attention and provoke an internal (sometimes external) “Ah haaaah” and a wide grin of understanding.

I think that short stories can pull of these flourishes better than novels or films because they are much more focused and having a twist or game-changing reveal at the end of a 4000 word story has multitudes less threads to wrap up than a 400 page novel or 2 hour film. Revealing something shocking about a character who has had a few lines of description and only existed in readers minds for a few short minutes feels less jarring and arbitrary than doing the same to a character who has had paragraphs upon paragraphs of description and countless chapters of growth.

It may even be that having a flourish or twist at the end has become such a common trope in the short story (especially Dahl who reveals in the twisted ending) that readers have come to accept and expect it, thus question isn’t should it have been there, but rather how well was it done.

I will definitely try to have a [INSERT FRENCH WORD HERE] in my 800 word Short Story due next week.