In today’s feedback session for the Another World studio we has a general discussion and the Serial podcast came up. It is an investigation into the murder of a young woman, and her boyfriend, who is possibly innocent of the crime was convicted and sent to prison. I has just started listening to it and I find that it is a very personal first person journey through a murder mystery. Even though the murder is solved, I believe the podcast raises questions about the investigation and does so through interviews and first person narration. I found this to be an interesting device and will keep it in mind when developing the murder mystery plot.

In regards to the murder mystery and disaster genres in Deluge, and whether or not to feature one overriding genre or not I decided to plot out the story to see which types of events fit into the specific genres. In order to investigate how genre functions in the storyworld, I first had to understand how the characters would interact with each other. What events would force people to interact?, How would the characters interact with the world? All of these questions rely on an understanding how exactly the narrative would unfold and what events would take place. This would determine which genre was more  dominant and that would help decide if an overriding genre was needed or apparent. I ended up plotting out the entire fabula (story), including the events that happened prior to the action contained in this specific storyworld.

This was very time consuming, and the character map was greatly amended, however it was helpful in fleshing out the entire story for this world. I came to the conclusion that the murder mystery demands a tightly interconnected plot with many interconnected events and misdirection to entice the audience, and many events in the story evolved around the murder mystery, however the disaster genre overlapped with the murder mystery genre towards the end. Therefore the beginning murder exposition does involve a lot of events, however the disaster genre builds on the murder mystery events to create tension and takes over around half way through the narrative until the resolution of the murder mystery takes completes the narrative. I have decided that there is not one overriding genre and that both genres work together to advance plot and increase the tension.

The fabula details for Deluge are below and will be developed over the course of the studio.

The updated character map is below.