Wednesday’s ‘Story Smash’ activity turned out to be a really interesting and valuable brainstorming/writing experience. The process of breaking apart and combining aspects from each of our 3 story concepts proved to be quite difficult, however I think we approached the challenge in an effective and open-minded manner.
We started by taking the characters from 2/3 of our individual concepts and placing them in the world of the 3rd concept. Getting the ‘mix’ to feel natural took a bit of time, but I think we were able to combine characters and events from different stories (and even genres) relatively well.
I feel like this method of blending of characters, events and locations together allowed us to create more logical & meaningful links between our ideas.
I noted that as we progressed further in our story ‘smashing’, there remained a number of components from our individual ideas that we struggled to incorporate – but I suppose this is to be expected when trying to merge such contrasting stories.
As it was part of the exercise, we did attempt to merge as much as we could from our concepts, however this often forced us to make connections that I felt were a bit of a stretch. We also felt that our combined story began to feel quite bloated and overwhelming – but I think the fact that we were able to recognise and acknowledge this was a good thing.
As we constructed and discussed our story we also began to think of ways in which we could build a transmedia product around the narrative we had created thus far. These discussions proved to be very useful, and I think they allowed us to create a story idea that would be quite adaptable to a transmedia format.
Reading back on what we created, I think the most powerful aspects of our stitched-together-story were the situations, character interactions, and key events that we came up with. I’m really interested to continue experimenting with the idea that we developed, and to further explore how it could be transformed into a transmedia narrative.