Sam and I drafted 5 rules for our collaboration in the project:

(1) To keep in regular contact.
(2) To share the workload evenly.
(3) To complete work on time and to an expected standard.
(4) To approach the project in a professional manner, with the aim of pursuing the project beyond the classroom.
(5) To remain close to source material and achieve a level of realism within the narrative.
… As well as adhering to a smart-casual dress code in all meetings…

Post 2015. Metadata is collected on every Australian citizen to fight terrorism. To protect the people. Jump into the shoes of a journalist.  You get your first big break – you are approached by a government whistleblower who claims that a recent high profile terrorism conviction was a miscarriage of justice. The man convicted was innocent despite the overwhelming evidence in his metadata. He was present but not involved, like the thousands of other people who saw Flinders Street Station disappear.  But how could a law enacted to protect the Australian people be used to oppress them as this source suggests? Can the whistleblower be trusted or do they have a vendetta of their own? If the data doesn’t lie, who does?

You will be forced to choose on a course of action and follow your gut instincts.  Who should you believe?  Sifting through the data and documents collected will be daunting, but will it reveal the truth? The story will be explored through Twine and other digital documents.  Can you solve the mystery?

Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002) presents numerous overlapping narratives, which converge in the film’s action-packed finale.  Essentially, the film explores screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s difficulty in adapting Susan Orlean’s novel The Orchid Thief for the big screen, adding fanciful and heightened elements to Kaufman’s real-life writer’s block, including Kaufman’s fictional brother, Donald, as a means of satirising Hollywood’s reductionism of source material to formulaic three-act fare.  While Adaptation is certainly not the first metafilm (a film which draws attention to its own production), it does represent a superlative example, in the way that it cleverly weaves the viewer through multiple levels of fiction and reality.

In the main, Adaptation presents two intertwining stories: Charlie Kaufman’s immense difficulty in adapting The Orchid Thief and the depiction of parts of Orlean’s original novel, including the theft of rare orchids by John LaRoche.

Adaptation contains all of the elements that Levi Manovich regards as being essential components for a story.  Charlie Kaufman fulfils the role of author and narrator, both of the script and in his fictionalised form on screen.  Susan Orlean is another author of – and in – Adaptation, whose source material is depicted in stylised flurries between the main story of Charlie’s writer’s block and who is credited accordingly (despite the fact that little of the original novel features in the film).  A third author in Adaptation is Charlie’s brother, Donald, whose high-octane genre filmmaking tropes takeover the film’s final third, despite Charlie’s disdain for such cliches.

Interestingly, the film’s script is credited to Charlie and Donald (who is Charlie’s alter-ego, although this wouldn’t have been known by many unsuspecting audience members when viewing the film for the first time).  In doing so, the filmmaker’s draw attention to the veracity of the events we have just witnessed unfolding on-screen: have we just seen a genuine dramatised ‘making of’?  Did Charlie and Donald really get hunted down by Orlean and LaRoche after discovering their pursuit of rare orchids had to do with the psychoactive chemicals it contained?  Did Orlean and LaRoche really commence a drug-addled affair?  Without prior knowledge, the audience is letting wondering what is real and what is not.

Another interesting element of the film is the portrayal of story guru Robert McKee and how Kaufman uses McKee’s ‘story commandments’ to parody himself in the film.  Despite Kaufman’s disdain towards what he sees as McKee’s formulaic instructions, Kaufman elicits help from his action-writer brother Donald to help him finish his adaption of Orlean’s work, and indeed Adaptation itself ends with a high stakes final act and the protagonist who is left changed by what he has just experienced (for the better).

Remix is also an important part of Adaptation, largely through this self-parodying, its action-packed final act (the most pedestrian part of the film) as well the script which Donald sells called ‘The 3’, which is a humorous play and satirising of high-concept Hollywood thrillers and specifically, split personality thrillers.

This week we looked at remix culture, as well as the role of audience participation in the crafting of narrative.

As a writer, it is heartening and relieving to hear that there are no wholly original stories.  It takes the pressure off a little.  The elements, motifs and basic ‘creative language’ that are used to construct stories are well-established, having been around (and having constantly evolved) for thousands of years.

Originality is still a noble and achievable goal for creatives, through the fresh and original collation of familiar elements.  Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), for instance, takes familiar tropes of amnesia and noir-ish elements (including a hard-bitten protagonist) and presents these in a fresh new way by playing with chronology.  Similarly, Pulp Fiction (1994) assembles classic characters and scenarios of bygone American genre films and music in a modern setting with a nifty re-structured chronology to keep viewers hooked.

Daniel also raised the question in class of whether language is necessary for storytelling.  My answer is an emphatic yes.  The language doesn’t necessarily need to be spoken or written; the language may be symbols; providing that as a medium, they encode the author(s)’ meaning and can be decoded by the audience.

Sometimes that decoding is quite straightforward (as in the case of genre narratives, like Frankenstein (1930) and many more), while at other times the message or theme presented is far more abstract and requires greater (and far more subjective) interpretation on the part of the audience, which was the case for the short film we watched in class.

It’s very useful to deconstruct what story is and to examine its mandatory components; which, like good stories, are open for discussion.

For me, a story conveys a message (or theme); it intends to affect the audience in a deliberate way.  Nowadays, with the explosion of interactive media, the intention of the author might be to engage audience members in crafting the narrative and the meaning they derive from the experience.

I have always preferred traditional narratives, particularly film, rather than transmedia because, to my mind, being immersed in a single medium facilitates the suspension of disbelief (which is something I want when seeking out entertainment).  In comparison, a transmedia project draws more attention to its form by prompting participants to switch between media.

Nevertheless, transmedia works  successfully capture contemporary life in a way that a single medium (such as a film, tv show, or computer game) cannot.  For instance, on any given day most of us switch between several different platforms – smart phone, laptop, tv, tablet, etc.  Transmedia projects thus capture the essence of 21st century life by spreading across these various platforms; they capture the freneticism and fragmentation (and arguably, overstimulation) that have come to define the modern techno era.

I am interested in learning about transmedia firstly for pragmatic reasons, since any media practitioner practicing nowadays must have some degree of cross platform applications to remain viable and competitive.  Secondly, should I want to capture and communicate the aforementioned freneticism of the contemporary era, transmedia seems like the most fitting outlet – echoing the spirit of Marshall McLuhan’s sentiment that the medium (or media) is the message.

I am confident that traditional, single platform narratives can exist harmoniously alongside multi-platform projects, since – in their best forms – films and television offer a carefully structured, ‘uninterrupted’ emotional catharsis that audiences still crave, and which I believe is not offered by transmedia projects.