Up until this week we always had an idea what media items we were going to create to tell our narrative, however this week we planned it more in depth. We firstly cleared up with Dan if you count each media outlet individually or as an umbrella group. E.g. we had several social media accounts and we weren’t sure if we had to count them each as a platform or social media as a whole.

Even though Dan told us that social media is one platform on it’s own, we decided to cull our social media to just the Blog and Facebook. This way the information isn’t spread as thin and it’s easier to locate information.

I started to make a list of all the real-world items we needed to start making to then upload to the blog. I started working on the articles, and also created an insignia for the society from 1901. Aidan and Bec created some posters to put around the RMIT campus and Melbourne CBD. And Jeremy made an interactive map where the bodies from 1901 where found, staff and guest lists from the parties and letters between the characters.

It’s cool beginning to implement our planning. There has been so much planning involved and it’s starting to make more sense to me now that it’s all coming together – I can see the theory from our readings in the start of the semester being put to effect.

This week we focused on hashing out the final narrative details. We really wanted to finalise the narrative so we could get to the next stage of the project and start to create our artefacts. We wanted to figure out plot holes and work out a timeline of releasing information to our audience. We realised we need to fine the balance of releasing the right information in the right amount so that audiences have enough information to run with and be interested motivated to try and figure the mystery out themselves – without telling them too much and giving them all the answers.

We started to work through this by completing the individual narratives from 1901, 1989 and 2016 and then working out inconsistencies in them so we could work out how we could retell it to our audience. Trying to correlate the narratives and figuring out how to tell the story to the audience has given me a new found appreciation for authors of crime mysteries, I can’t even imagine how TV shows like NCIS are still thinking of new episodes, 13 series in. There is an art to be able to think of a realistic crime yourself, give it enough motive but not make it really obvious and then to tell it to the audience in a way so they have the opportunity to solve it themselves is really hard work.

This week our group focused on the feedback we received in our pitch and adapted our story according to advice Ben and Leena gave us. The main pointers they gave us were to make sure our story has an element that makes audiences today feel they can relate to. Because the murder is set 100 years ago it may mean we lose sight of the audience today and audiences don’t feel any connection to the story. We need to ensure we can make the story appealing to audiences and that our main character has his own story, his own personal problems that the audience can relate to, so that audiences form a relationship to his character and feel involved.

Ben gave us the idea of adding a character who also investigated the murder before Atticus started investigating, this gives us the ability to add pieces of evidence that Atticus doesn’t have to search for himself so we can tell the story in the short amount of time we have. This also bridges the 1901 murders and the 2016 investigation so it isn’t too ancient and foreign.

We also discussed how much control should we be giving our audience. As Leena mentioned we want them to feel like their actions are driving the narrative, however for our project we feel like we still need to hold control over the story’s progression. Finding a solution to this problem will require us to balance audience control and find ways to generate a sense of agency in players whenever we can.