Our project brief for assessment task four of The Story Lab is to create a media object that relates a narrative across multiple platforms.  We have chosen to base our narrative around a combination of an ongoing real life news story and a fictional anecdote linked by a common theme.

Our project, simply titled Connor, depicts the social and mental struggles of a young man who doesn’t seem to fit in with the world around him.  Feeling outcast by his peers and neglected by his family, Connor decides he can’t take any more and meticulously prepares a violent end to those ignorant enough to ignore his presence at his classmates’ house party he was not invited to.  The character draws inspiration from Elliot Rodger, who committed the 2014 Isla Vista killings, taking the lives of 7 people and injuring 14 others, blaming his attack over “childhood [problems], family conflicts, frustration over not being able to find a girlfriend, his hatred of women and his contempt for racial minorities and interracial couples”.

Our narrative will take place across five different platforms of media each allowing a different type and degree of interaction by audiences.  The five platforms are a film mini-series (or webisodes), YouTube video blogs, a Facebook party event and photo album, faux news articles, and a tangible personal diary.  Each platform will be directly linked to at least one other artefact, though not all are necessary to experience in order to gain a significant understanding of Connor’s plight.

Although our narrative has a distinctive timeline, where audiences will pick up the tale will vary.  This is because the links to the different platforms are non-linear and thus, unlikely to be discovered in the “correct” order.   For the sake of describing the artefacts however, I’ll describe each piece in chronological order.

The story will pick up with the mini-series, though these will not be from the perspective of Connor himself.  Instead, the planned three short films will explore the interactions between Connor and other members in his life, including his mother, his neighbour, and class mates.  The episode with his mother will uncover Connor’s private diary, his neighbour will observe Connor filming his vlogs late at night, and the school episode will uncover details of the party Connor has been excluded from.

Connor’s diary will illustrate the most in-depth look into the damaged psyche of a soon-to-be murderer, and include a collage of facts and details he has collected over time to plot his retribution.  The diary’s presentation will draw inspiration from the literary experiment “S.” written by Doug Dorst and conceived by J.J. Abrams, which includes postcards, handwritten letter, maps and photocopied articles to provide evidence and clues to the wider narrative.

The vlogs Connor records are also highly personal, but more theatrical and ambiguous than what is depicted in his diary.  The vlogs will be shot on a laptop camera and will be uploaded to YouTube on Connor’s account.  His performance is intended to demonstrate Connor’s odd personality, as though he intends for his classmates to view them and justify their estranged thoughts of him before he exacts his revenge.

Like the YouTube videos, the Facebook event page and accompanying photo album will be uploaded in real time, with audiences having received hints to the dates and details of the occasion in the films, vlogs and diary.  The photo album will unknowingly display Connor’s deceased victims, with the party members assuming their friends are simply intoxicated and passed out, though comments from the event’s attendees over time will lead audiences to believe otherwise.  The decision to upload the photos in “real time” circumvents the issue of people uploading photos of people the morning after, in which time they would surely have learned of their deaths.

Finally, the narrative will be tied together by two news articles, which will also be uploaded in the correct “elapsed” amount of time.  The first article will simply detail the case of the bodies found following the house party, but provide little details.  In this way, this article could prove a useful starting point for audiences to discover the project’s narrative and have to work backwards to find all the details.  The second article, published approximately one week later, will provide audiences with all the answers as to “whodunnit”, including direct links back to Connor’s vlogs, Facebook event, and interviews with his fellow peers.

The roles and responsibilities in order to achieve this project will be divided evenly across all members of our group, according to each member’s individual set of skills and interests.  I would like to assume the task of creating the online news articles, although I will likely need help from other members in creating the webpage.