This week was our final submission for our assessment for of Story Lab. Since the beginning of the semester I came into this class thinking I had a pretty solid understanding of what story was,  as a film and media student I knew how to form a script or read a screen play. I thought I understood how media got around and how it was constantly evolving and changing, but by the end of this semester after all the classes where completed and I had worked on creating my own form of transmedia story, I learnt a completely new way of looking at story. The ideas of audience and platforms went deeper then I could have ever thought, how story wasn’t just told to an audience through its ex. (genre or its linearity). It stem from a deep connection that takes place to its audience. I found that the structure of creating a story and the ideas of audience agency and the the forms of transmedia storytelling to be a completely new and an untapped level of storytelling when we first started learning about the topics. But over time I found how crucial they are to creating story and how integral they are in even some of my most well loved films, web series, production companies, television shows, video games etc….

Our story Classified I believe was a great combination of what we learned over our time in Story Lab. Both Karl and I came up with an idea original based off one of my first stories created in our very first class group activities. We slowly started to expand upon all the elements we had seen over the weeks and could see our story coming together. The end product for our story Classified turned out to be a non-digital heavy linear style, detective case, political thriller. Karl and I both agreed from the start that we wanted something our audience could feel connected with and really part of this case, giving our audience a whole bunch of tangible pieces of evidence to play with over the course of the story which we both feel came together really well.

Coming from our film and television backgrounds, both karl and I knew that a digital element to this story would be necessary to give it a worldly and current feel, as well as make it accessible to a wide audience. The idea for this really came through in our teaser trailer. After we set up the detective mystery vibe that handed itself to the evidence pieces really well, we found that we wanted to cover a wider audience and decided that the best way to do that would to be to create the online hate blogger account we had originally discussed. This online element allowed us to also disclose our assessment for ethical reasons and also provide some digital footage to come into our story outside of our non digital evidence pieces.

All in all with the collaborative pieces of the two Karl and I really loved what we had created in the end. We look back and agree that if we had the chance to change things we would and can both accept areas where we could have improved for future references. But we came to terms with the fact that we choose to present an open ended story, that the audience could have fun following along and enjoy the experience of the mystery we had created for them. I believe that we worked really great together and fulfilled the requirements we had stated to uphold at the start of creating Classified. We always kept in contact and kept up with the work load, neither one taking on anything to tough for one person to handle and both distributing the work evenly, which really helped us stick to timing and deadlines. Right from the beginning Karl and I both knew we could tackle this assessment and overall we are very happy with the outcome of our work and looking back on the class I have enjoyed what I learnt from Story Lab and really appreciate the experiences I can take from the class as well as everything I learnt about story.