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.

This week in The Story Lab, our project team began preparations for our presenting our project pitch to a panel of four ‘potential investors’ and the rest of the class.  In particular, it was a really interesting experience to get to hear the other groups in the class present their ideas, even though many of the ideas, including ours, are still in the prototype drafting stage.  It quickly became clear that each different group had put together a vastly different idea, with both unique narratives and ways in which their stories would be told.  In particular, I both enjoyed and was gravitated towards the projects Dodging the Bullet, a narrative about the disappearance of a girl after involving herself in an online relationship, and Protest of Passion, a faux political campaign.

As one of the later groups to present, I thought our group presentation was sound, however potentially did not clearly translate and explain itself to the audience quite enough.  Feedback from the panel seemed positive, our narrative and inspiration intrigued and interested the panel, however it was suggested by a few members that maybe we have bitten off more than we can chew, in terms of how many platforms we are planning to relay the story across.  Upon later discussions with the group in regards to the feedback, we have decided to abandon the idea of the short films, as not only were they to be the most time consuming, but also were not as relevant in telling Connor’s story, as they were from an outside perspective.  The short films also did not fit with the ‘realism’ of the project, and would be jarring to the narrative and to audiences when ‘pushing off’ between a fictional film, to a more realistic platform, such as Facebook and YouTube.

After a few short weeks of identifying narrative techniques and cross-platform storytelling, this week sees the first real commencement of our own transmedia project, which is titled ‘CONNOR’.  Kylie and I ran auditions for the title role of Connor; an outsider who is bullied and excluded throughout his schooling, although he brings much of this upon himself.  Connor’s character is arrogant and narcissistic, which only helps to further his segregation from his peers.  He is also highly misogynistic, blaming girls for dating ‘immature’ and ‘unintelligent’ jocks over himself.  Both the character and narrative draw from the murders committed by American teen Elliot Rodgers; though we hope that our way of communicating Connor’s plight to audiences will the unique factor.  The aim is for our narrative to spill into the real world in real time as the story unfolds, largely via the use of social media, including Connor’s own YouTube vlogs, and a Facebook Event that will include a photo album from the night Connor decides to claim his retribution.  Other platforms we plan to include are three short films, from the perspective of those around Connor, a highly personal private diary of Connor’s, that will build to the eventual murders Connor will commit, as well as a series of news articles, which will be used to direct audiences through the narrative.

In particular, two actors who auditioned for the role of Connor stood out; their names were Nero and Thomas.  Both actors were highly impressive in their improvised performance, which was recorded in the style of a YouTube Vlog.  Both actors had clearly done their research on our narrative, both drawing the connection between Connor and Rodgers, without being prompted.   It will doubtless be an incredibly tough decision to make, and as a group, we will re-watch the audition tapes before making a final judgement.

In class, we had a guest lecture from Dr. Troy Innocent, a world builder, iconographer and transmedia artist.  Though his projects he discussed were on a larger scale than our projects could possibly ever hope to achieve, Troy stressed that the audience needed a reward for completing and participating in our projects.  Obviously, with our projects being extremely low budget, this reward would not be a physical one; rather we need to provide our audiences with a sense of self-satisfaction once they find each interlocking narrative platform.  To me, this means that our narrative should not be a complete one, therefore allowing audiences to piece the story together for themselves, so that not only will it prove satisfactory, but also hopefully help in keeping them actively engaged throughout the entire work.

Reflect on your experience of presenting your research, and note anything you learnt from the presentations of others. 

As for my own presentation, I don’t have much to say, other than that I was unexpectedly chosen first, so I definitely wasn’t as clear and succinct in the description of my essay as I would have liked.  I undoubtedly benefited more from listening to the findings and thought processes of others, particularly those who also chose to base their research on the transmedia viral marketing campaign of The Dark Knight.

As discussed in my Week 3 blog post (which I’ve since amended to reflect this revelation), originally I doubted the ‘narrative relevance’ the campaign had on the film itself.  I believed that while mock articles in The Gotham Times, which are filled with “Easter eggs” and direct references to Nolan’s The Dark Knight universe, the Bat Signal being projecting over a city as the ‘Citizens of Batman’ gathered below was simply a marketing ploy for the then upcoming film. And while bonus scenes of a news bulletin on a Gotham television network featuring a press conference with Harvey Dent actor Aaron Eckhart which became viewable to fans could easily slip into the universe’s canon, ordinary citizens of the real world rallying for the “I Believe In Harvey Dent” cause, was not.

However, my perspective was completely changed (and indeed as was my entire outlook for my essay’s argument) when my fellow classmate Mollie presented her findings, in which she explained how one of the first scenes in The Dark Knight involves Gotham City residents dressed as Batman, trying to take down Scarecrow before the real Batman intervenes.  This is synonymous with the final act of the film’s advertising campaign, where the ‘Citizens of Batman’ gathered in city streets beneath the Bat Signal.  At the same time, the rallies that had been conducted in real life, supporting Harvey Dent as Gotham’s new District Attorney also directly coincides with the film, as we learn Harvey has recently been elected for the role.  She argued that in this way, the promotional campaign for the film could even be seen as a prequel itself for the film, taking place between the events of 2005’s Batman Begins, and The Dark Knight sequel three years later.

For the final 50-100 words, provide your new understanding/philosophy of what story is, based on your research.

While the definition of story still remains, it is evident from The Story Lab course that the many ways in which story can be told is vastly underrated and often given little thought by audiences, though it appears this is rapidly changing by ways of new technologies which allow audiences to interact differently by engaging directly with narrative.  Story is not limited to a book or a song; instead the smallest or most complex narrative can be found in the world around us – it just needs an author.