As I mentioned in my week seven reflection, I was nervous about starting project three when it was first introduced to us, simply because I wasn’t entirely sure what was expected of us and what was wanted for the final outcome. However, taking it week by week made it easier to get the handle of.

When we were first introduced to the project Dan mentioned one of the projects from last year that had this massive excel spread document with all the planning and dates to release things, so I kept this in mind during our planning and tried to follow that suit. Ben Mackenzie from Pop Up Playground also shone light on how much panning was involved in his projects which gave us an idea of what to expect for the first half of the semester.

The feedback we received from the pitch was really helpful and gave us good pointers for our project. For example, we kept in mind giving the story a young voice and making it engaging for modern audiences despite it being set 100 years ago.

We also had the idea of agency at the back of our minds when planning how to make it interactive. As Janet Murray said, ‘activity alone is not an agency.’ We were conscious that some people would simply want to observe the game from a distance and not contribute, however we tried to make it appealing for audiences to ‘play’ and solve the mystery, in order to give players the most agency and make it more enjoyable.

Because there was so much planning involved in creating an interactive narrative I felt like we were getting nowhere for a couple of weeks. For me, I felt like because our narrative was Jeremy’s original idea I didn’t want to contribute to the narrative and taint his idea in a way he might not like, so I took a back seat for the first couple of weeks and didn’t contribute much to the narrative. However after hashing out the discrepancies in the story and working out character developments, I gained more confidence to contribute my own ideas.

It wasn’t until about week ten when things started coming together; we started implementing our planning and got to see our work paying off. There was so much planning involved and the readings from the start of the semester were starting to make more sense to me, being being put to practise.

Overall I was really happy with our progress throughout this project, it seemed really slow and tedious at the start but once we started to implement our plans, it made it much easier.

In my week seven reflection I said ‘I want our project to become a successful transmedia narrative’ and I think that we have achieved that. As I hoped, this project has definitely opened my eyes to how to create successful transmedia narrative – lots and lots of planning, make it relatable for your audience, and think of how you can give your audience the ‘satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices’ (Janet Murray, Agency).

Since we first talked about Agency in week two, I have thought about it in relation to a lot of the things I do now. Especially when making our final projects, about how we can evoke agency for our own audience.

As Jesse Hassenger states in his article, Ghostbusters, Frozen, and the strange entitlement of fan culture, ‘the idea that hashtags, even progressive and non-sexist ones, might determine plot points of movies is a little chilling’. Audiences, particular for fans of cult classics feel a sense of entitlement when it comes to that film/book/TV show, As Hassenger put it, fans can ‘feel particularly possessive of that film.’

As we discussed in week two, ‘there is a fine line between giving into ridiculous fan demands and listening to you audience, especially regarding representation.’

The question is, do you give the audience what they want? But then you’ll be criticised because you’re not being true to the story. But then it could be even more popular because your fans are satisfied. But you can never satisfy everybody so you should try to listen to your audience. Where do you find the balance?

I find myself guilty of criticising authors, when a narrative doesn’t pan out how I wanted. But there is nothing better than the gratifying feeling when you get what you wanted. However this feeling gives fans a false sense of entitlement, which has created modern fan culture.

In an assignment last year I looked at adaptation of books into films, I spoke to Stephen Gaunson who works in Cinema Studies and Creative Writing, and he said that filmmakers often make errors when they try to take exactly what is in the book and put it on camera. They do this to try and please the fan base, but it actually often leaves fans unsatisfied, because there’s always something missing, an aspect from the narrative that you can’t get across on screen. He said that good adaptations should try and bring something new to the story that isn’t in the first medium, something that sets it apart.

As Hassenger says, ‘fans don’t need to get what they want, and much of the time, they probably shouldn’t.’

This week we hashed out the little details in the narrative that weren’t complete. We realised there were parts of the story where we all had different ideas about what happened/ who did was/ why so we solved those issues. After elaborating our narrative we worked on our production timeline. We need figured out what we are going to release and when, in a way that makes sense to the audience but isn’t obvious. A way that gives the information and tools they need to solve the case themselves.

This has been a long time coming; we attempted to do this at the very start with not much luck. This attempt was much more successful, I think that having successfully developed the narrative first made it easier. That was we can work backwards and it will give us a better idea of the gaps in evidence we need to fill.

As Lena and Ben suggested in our pitch I looked at the Serial website to see what method they used to release their information and took some inspiration from that.

I focused on writing articles from 1901. Writing is definitely not my strong suit and I struggled to use ‘old’ language, I found it easier to write them in modern language and then come back to them and adapt them to language more suited to the 1901 era, I didn’t want to make them too ‘old timey’ though because we are still appealing to the modern audience and we want to make it interesting for them without them having to struggle to understand what the articles say. We need to find a balance between making the artefacts interesting but also making them believable so the audience feels really involved.