For our transmedia project, we have decided to base our story on a young teenager named Connor who is essentially an isolated and anti-social young man. Conner is unsettling and weird and doesn’t know how to socialise or how to fit. He has a large sense of entitlement and believes deep down he is so much better than others, but not in an arrogant way (rather a delusional one). Audiences may identify with his sense of isolation and indifference, and it is important for them to be able to find something within Connor to root for, as the audience needs to care for our transmedia project to be a success.

The complexity of Connor lies within his introverted personality. He is the type of guy who has the potential to simply snap. And where this transmedia story starts is at the very cusp of his self titled “retribution”. Connor, after 6 years at the same high school, in a non-cliche way, isn’t invited to another house party. At this point, he decides to go the party and kill as many people as he can with his bare hands. He uses whatever he can as a weapon, and people are so drunk that they don’t question whether the girl in the bush passed out from too much alcohol. Everyone is having too much fun to realise Conner has drowned someone in the pool. Conner is trying to be smart and subtle about his murders and leaves the party without raising any attention.

Actor Thomas Bowman doing a screen test for an online video blog as Connor.

There is a specific sequence of how events will unfold. Connor’s story exists within the world that is created inside three online video webisodes (released in a specific order on Vimeo). The first webisode will be from the point of view of the neighbour who observes Connor as he comes to and from school. The neighbour may have a certain limitation which prevents him from leaving home thus excessively noticing little details and behaviour of the people around him. At some point, the neighbour observes Connor through his bedroom window, talking to himself at his computer. This is a push off point for audience members who can connect the clues and realise that Connor has an online video blog. The second webisode will be from the point of the view of the mum who may snoop around Connors room and find his diary in which he writes his inner most, darkest, twisted thoughts. This is a push-off point for our tangible transmedia object, Connor’s diary.

In between what happens in the second and third webisodes, Connor has cracked, and has turned up to the house party and murdered some of his peers. At this house party, there is a photographer who is taking photos of the people and highlights of the party. Another transmedia item will be the first of two newspaper articles: this article will be the initial reports of the murders at the party, simply speculating the murderer, victims, and what happened. The next day will be the release of the photo album in which there are photos where Connor is ‘lurking’ in the background, hinting that he was there during the sinister activities and could possibly be the murderer. Links to comments on the photos in the album can lead audiences to Connors Facebook page, and in turn, his youtube account. This will reveal to audiences his true backstory and what caused his ‘snap’.

The final transmedia objects to be released will be the third webisode and the second of the newspaper articles, which will reveal Connor as the murderer, and exactly how he killed his victims. Within the webisode and newspaper article, Connor’s full name and YouTube account will be uncovered so that audiences are directly lead to the online videos. Additionally, interviews with students from Connor’s school will reveal that they all think “he is a freak” and it “doesn’t surprise them that weirdo is the murderer” – revealing again, that the students still lack the empathy to understand Connor’s situation.

What has been considered is whether or not we need the final transmedia element: Connor’s online vlogs – perhaps the story could be more unique if audiences were to put their own idea of who the murderer is. Maybe the hunt for the murderer could be open for speculation amongst audiences based on visual clues in the Facebook photos and webisodes. This is something we will further discuss, as we have realised we do have quite a number of elements to this project; there are 5 of us but we may need to cut down somewhere to improve quality. We will all put in an even amount of work and definitely play to our strengths. A number of us are great with the technical side of production work, and others are better at pre and post production. Roles will be assigned according to these strengths. Persomally I am interested in doing the cinematography and photography for the webisodes and Facebook photos as I think constructing a story and implying certain ideas to audiences through only ‘showing’ is a fascinating area of storytelling.

This week we ran auditions for the part of Connor in our transmedia assignment. Our final project will be based around a character called Connor, who is an outsider in his school environment and decides to murder those who have wronged him. This is a story that has been done before, but everything is a remix, and we want to use some of the best elements of other murder mysteries in our story. Plus, according to last weeks theory, we have concluded that “the web should be a place to present stories and characters which aren’t normally seen on a network.” Our character wouldn’t make for a mainstream television show, but rather, we think that using different forms of media is more effective as it creates more of a mystery and forces audiences to find other bits of information if they want to get to the bottom of the story.

We want to base our narrative in several different forms of media:

• Online vlogs – for Connor to vent about his life and provide an insight into his mental state
• 3 Webisodes – from the point of view of three different people besides Connor to provide a commentary of the world in which Connor lives that is separate to his view. At this stage we think the webisodes will be from the point of view of a neighbour, his mother and the news.
• A written diary of Connors – in which he writes his deepest (and evilest) thoughts which he doesn’t share with his subscribers.
• A newspaper article – which outlines the events of the party in which Connor attends and kills several of his fellow students.
• A facbeook event and photo album – which other Facebook profiles will comment on and help make the narrative seem real. They will also allow for the links to be made between the student profiles and eventually Connor’s online vlogs.

Because this is an extremely low budget project, we will rely heavily on the quality of the acting of the male lead, for he needs to be able to convey Connor’s *snap*. I think we have found our actor, which is exciting. He delivered a very convincing vlog in his audition. We are yet to determine whether we have too much on our plate yet, and whether actors (particular Connor) will be able to commit to such a time frame.

In class, we had a guest lecturer come and visit us called Dr Troy Innocent. After listening to his lecture, one of the main things that I took away from it was how important it is for all of the narrative to work towards an ending. There needs to be a reason why audiences want to reach the end of the story; there needs to be a reward. This reminds me of the blog where I wrote about the video game The Last of Us – there needs to be challenges but there needs to be rewards. With our story, Connor, we need to determine what will motivate audiences to work towards our final artefact. If it is really obvious Connor is the killer, that what will our ending be? This is something that we need to decide as a group.

This week was extended over 2 weeks because of Easter break. What we focused on was the presentation of our research reports on examples of narrative which we think plays with structure, convention or traditional ideas of what a ‘story’ could/should be.

I focused my research on Sin City (2005) which is basically several comic books compounded into one movie with fascinating American neo-noir that stays true to the comics. I think my research was received quite well in class as most people had seen Sin City and could relate to the topics I discussed.

One of the most interesting examples, I think, came from Matt on his discussion of Niki Minaj’s video clip Anaconda (which you can read here). In recent years there has definitely been a shift in the potential of music videos and their capability to tell a story. I remember when I was younger and majority of music videos would be all about the crazy costumes and disco lighting where the artist(s) would perform the song. Now, it seems as if there is a more cinematic approach to attaching video to a song. In the case of Anaconda, Matt writes about how Minaj has taken the original inspiration from Sir Mix-a-lot’s song “Baby Got Back” and changed the message. Using a lot of the baseline, drumbeat and lyrics from the song, Minaj is able to turn Anaconda into a song about women owning their own bodies and holding power over men (as opposed to the original meaning conveyed in ‘Baby Got Back’, where women were the subject of the male gaze). I thought this was an interesting narrative to look at because it isn’t one that is necessarily obvious, and the message is more powerful (in its own way..) through the use of video with the audio.

At this point in the course, I want to reflect on my idea of story telling and make a comment about any new understandings or ideas I may have of what story is. Last week Dan brought in a book called S which is basically a J.J Abrams novel but taken to the next level. There is extra writing in it as well as a lot of physical artefacts which can be removed from the book and looked at (e.g. notes of paper, drawings etc.) What I loved about this example is that you don’t really know where to start, and the book feels like many stories within a story – how does the creator decide or manipulate what is being looked at first? Are we supposed to read the book first or look at the annotations? It has a real feel of a discarded library book, and I find it so interesting that someone has deliberately chosen to deliberately vandalise a book, but still create the feeling that it is natural and candid. Basically, with story telling in the present time, I think audiences want more. I dthink they don’t want to simply be spoonfed with all the information. They want to be excited and eager to find out extra info ,and the story needs to be intriguing enough that they go the extra mile to find it.

Notes from Captain America and Agent Carter viewing:

Captain America: The First Avenger

Notes focusing on interactions with Agent Carter:

• “…gets a ride back with Agent Carter”
  • There is a real need to impress Agent Carter
  • She has authority and is a powerful, dominant character.
• Captain America: “I don’t know why you would want to join the army if you are a beautiful dame?”
  • Introduces the questions as to why she is in the army and how she got her ranking
• Agent Carter is very accurate with her shooting and she is a hard worker.
• She is obviously a minority like Captain America (before his transformation), but she also has the same courage as hm (recognizable when she is staring down the barrel of the gun at the car).

Marvel One Shots – Agent Carter

• Agent Carter is under appreciated and commended for doing a “bang-up job” for basically doing nothing. Told not to worry about handling “the rough stuff” – suggests that women aren’t as influential or proactive as men. This is a continuous theme throughout the film and sets Carter up to be the hero when she proves the men wrong. Makes a statement about undervaluing and underestimating women.
• Tony Stark wants Agent Carter to run SHIELD with him after her work getting The Zodiac. Push off point: Agent Carter moving to SHIELD
• Statis-Quo is reminded in the after film after the credits which is about the women’s bikini

Marvel’s Agent Carter

• Set in 1946 New York – immediately sets the scene for the role of women in America the 40’s.
• Mr Stark is the technician : push-off point for the Starks

Responce to follow up questions:

How does she fit as a character told across multiple different stories? How is the character configured in each of the separate artefacts? i.e. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011 feature film), One Shot: Agent Carter (short film), Marvel’s Agent Carter (TV show). Thoughts on planning.

Peggy works across each of the three narratives, as more and more of her story is revealed with each artefact. In Captain America, she is a supporting role; simply put, she is his love interest and serves the purpose of providing one of the emotional climaxes to the story (when Captain America acts heroically and could potentially die, leaving Peggy heartbroken). In the short film One Shot: Agent Carter, Peggy is beginning to show her worth, and that her character is strong, independent and powerful (despite what the men of the current time think). Finally in Marvel’s Agent Carter, she steps into the main role and proves she is no longer just Captain America’s girlfriend, but is so much more. Throughout all these different and separate artefacts, her character traits and personality remain the same, it is simply the varying degrees to which these aspects of her character are revealed that differentiates the different artefacts.

This week in class we starting talking about our stories and how we must choose the best media to tell the story. What it boiled down to was:

• Write down the experience that we want the audience to have from interacting with our story.
• Figure out how to tell the story: there is no such thing as an original idea, but it is in the relaying of the story that originality comes to fore. Our story will either copy, transfer or combine. We need to adapt to whatever we wrote in step one.

It’s funny because I never really thought of video games as platforms for story telling, but then I realised that they actually were. In class, Dan mentioned the video game The Last of Us which I absolutely loved playing. We discussed how it is intact a linear story: the player doesn’t get to choose the race and gender of the character they play, but we are subsequently drawn into the character no matter who it is. The story is intense, and as a player, we are challenged and rewarded at specific times. The game designers had orchestrated exactly what motive the player would have, and what they wanted the audience to get out of the story. The Last of Us in no way is an original story – a post-apocalyptic, zombie-like infested world is by no means original, but The Last of Us is a remix of some of the best concepts taken from other quality video games. And it has a very clear narrative. Even the trailer for the video game has elements of a cinematic experience that you would get from a film:

Another interesting point that relates to Robert McKee’s reading ‘The Substance of a Story’ and Andrew Stanton’s Ted Talk is summed up in the following meme:

…yet I still enjoyed this game immensely. Go figure.

Another way in which The Last of Us ties into our discussion on transmedia, nuggets and push-off points, is the extra extended material which surrounds this video game. There is an additional story which can be downloaded for an extra 2 hours of game play. It provides context for Ellie’s past. Whilst this is the same media as the video game, it plays on the idea that if audiences are interested enough, they will go looking for the extra material and extended story lines which may not have been included in the main narrative.

Another example of this which we looked at in class was in the case of The Matrix. When I first watched this film nearly 10 years ago, I was 11 and didn’t understand what the hell was going on. And frankly, I wasn’t a fan of sci-fi back then, and so I found the whole concept too outlandish to deal with. In class, we watched The Second Renaissance, Parts I + II which shed some light on what actually happened before the time frame of The Matrix – in essence, it was a prequel which gave a deeper insight into the reign of the machines. I never knew these short films existed, and without them, perhaps I never would have revisited The Matrix as I did after class. With the background knowledge provided from these two short films, I enjoyed The Matrix a whole lot more than I did the first time. I’m sure though, people older than I was when I first watched the film (and people with a higher attention span) wouldn’t have needed these short films to enjoy The Matrix, but their existence adds to the excitement and hype around the film.

Notes from:

McKee, Robert. (1997). ‘The Substance of Story.’ In S​tory: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting.​New York, USA: HarperCollins, pp. 135-154.

• All artists can lay hands on the raw materials of their art – except the writer.” Language and words are only a medium for storytelling – something more profound is the heart of the story.
• How do stories compel such intense mental and sentient attention from the audience?
• Plural protagonist: all individuals in the group share the same desire. If one has a success, they all do. If one has a setback, they all suffer.
• Multiprotagonist: characters pursue separate, individual desires; suffering and benefitting individually
• Multiprotagonist stories become multi-plot stories – they weave together smaller stories.
• Anything that can be given free will and the capacity to desire, take action and suffer the consequences can be a protagonist.
• The protagonist is a willful character
  • A story cannot be made about a protagonist that doesn’t want anything, who cannot make decisions, whose actions effect no change at any level.
• The protagonist has a conscious desire
  • The protagonist has a goal and knows what he/she wants.
• The protagonist may also have a self-contradictory unconscious desire
  • The audience can sense this unconscious desire even if the protagonist cannot.
• The protagonist must have an appropriate characterization.
  • He needs the right balance of qualities to pursue his desires.
  • He needs to be believable and realistic. The audience needs to believe that they could see the protagonist doing what he is doing.
• There must be hope: the audience must believe that the protagonist has a chance to achieve his desire.
  • A hopeless protagonist will not interest the audience.
• No matter how intimate or epic the setting, instinctively the audience draws a circle around the character and their world, a circumference of experience that’s defined by the nature of the fictional reality. The audience expects the storyteller to take the story to those distant depths and ranges.
• A story has to build to a final action after which the audience cannot imagine another.
  • If people leave and imagine scenes that should have happened, they won’t be as fulfilled. Not all their questions were answered and their emotions aren’t satisfied.
  • This doesn’t mean there can’t be a sequel. It just means that the story must have closure.
• The protagonist must be empathetic, he may or may not be sympathetic (i.e. likeable).
  • We need to find a shared humanity within the protagonist. There needs to be something about the character which strikes a chord, and when it does, it means that we want the protagonist to achieve what they are setting out to do.
  • This maintains the audience/story bond.

The Audience Bond

• Empathy is the glue for this bond
• When we empathize with a protagonist and his desire, we are in fact rooting for our own desires.
• It doesn’t matter if a protagonist is pleasant or not – the main hero doesn’t have to be a nice guy.

In Wednesdays class of this week, we were introduced to the concept of transmedia, and how we must first focus on our story, then introduce the best media to support it later on down the track. In the reading for this week, Manovich says that ‘ new media lends itself to a database model’ (Manovich 2001). What I found most interesting was analysing our experience of these technologies, which in essence, are broken up i.e. when we use a phone, our interactions are divided between Facebook, the calendar app, safari, the weather app etc – all are different sections of the phone and all appear to be segregated from each other, even though we are still using the singular phone. The internet is another example of a database where you can start on one page and end up somewhere completely different (something which can’t really happen in a library). Using these analogies helped me understand what Manovich was talking about.

What we also looked at was the idea that everything is a remix. Its funny because this is a concept which I have recently thought about. I tend to sometimes challenge myself to think of an idea – no matter how far fetched – that hasn’t already been written about, filmed or sung. And its always hard to do. Basically, Ferguson’s web series was so interesting to me (and was very entertaining). We are allowed to collect material, combine it, transform it and create something ‘new’. An artist who I (sometimes) like is Kanye West, and recently, it seems his albums are all about remixing everyone before him. Nearly 90% of his songs are sampled from elsewhere. But what he ends up with is something original. But the sampled material wasn’t his creation… so is he really that great? I don’t know – frankly you can get a headache arguing about it.

Something else we touched on this week was good story telling and some basic rules:

• Throw your characters at a situation, and if you have a decently written and constructed character, their response will basically write itself.
• Most of the stuff we will experience in our lifetimes will have been done before. This needs to be expected.
• Be prepared to kill your babies: at some point we will get feedback whether we want it or not. We need to be prepared to reconceive our entire narrative
• If you shock yourself first, that will usually shock the audience.