Mosaic is a television series on HBO with a twist. While the show aired on television in January, director Steven Soderbergh created what has been named a ‘standalone app’, an app that provides hours of further footage for viewers to engage with. The app has multiple “choice moments” where the viewer themselves must choose who’s perspective to watch the content from and what they’re viewing. While Soderbergh does not see his app as a ‘Choose your own adventure’ story, it still allows the audience some interaction and choice with their viewing.
This is just one of many ways directors are creating pieces for audiences to interact with. While Soderbergh did decide to keep his piece away from a ‘create your own adventure’ story, this style of interaction is becoming a popular way to interact with audiences. Last year Netflix released a create your own story series for children on their popular service, using the series to gain feedback on how create your own story works. While the series is not currently available as an online screen media piece, it has the potential to grow into an interesting part of the interactive media spectrum. Another example of this is Episode, a mobile storytelling app that features billions of different episodes based around real life Hollywood stories that is completely interactive and allows the audience to choose the path of their story.
When looking at new media technology, Lev Manovich discusses the idea of variability in his text The Language of New Media, and how similar information is now organised in a way that makes each experience tailor made for the particular viewer. While Manovich may not have been describing interactive media when describing this principle, create your own story could be seen as an example of variability, creating a different experience using very similar information for each online media user, based on their interests.
When thinking about the word ‘Interactive’, my partner and I knew that we had to decide on something achievable to put together. While I loved some of the pieces I interacted with on Docubase, I simply do not have the technology skills to create something so advanced. A ‘create your own adventure story’, on the other hand, felt like something that, if it was simplified enough, would be achievable to create.
Our first thoughts for our project centred around the movie Sliding Doors, which shows the life of a woman from two perspectives, one as if she had of caught her train in the morning, and one as if she missed it. We discussed the idea of filming someone going through tasks in their day and reaching many moments where they would need to make a choice. However, instead of showing the consequences to both the choices, we would make the choices episodic, a key form in online screen media, with the end of each episode ending with a decision. The decision the audience would make would effect the next episode they would watch, they would not necessarily view all of the content and it would be tailor-made for them.
However, as spoken about in my last blog post, the concept and overall purpose of our production was very important to us, and the idea of ‘going through tasks’ felt incredibly vague and did not have a message or purpose for its creation. This made us turn to our own experience to decide exactly what we wished to make. We looked around our own environment to think about the possibilities of what we could make, and how we could use our own experiences to work on it.
In the end, we have decided to go down the instructional road, and make an interactive piece for someone new to RMIT who may not know their way around, an issue that majority of first year students, and many students beyond that face. We thought about some of the things we find difficult as students, such as borrowing from the library, finding a good place to study and reading our timetable, and used these experiences to create a bit of a map to outline how we could show these things to our audience in a way that was interactive, multifaceted and followed a create your own story format.
While our idea is still forming, it feels good to know that we now have a clearer idea of what we hope to create, and the structure our piece will take.