“I learned something in the studio that highlighted my previous experience/lack of previous experience with screenwriting…”
I learned something in the studio that highlighted my previous experience with screenwriting. My team created a story based on an escape room which is like a game where audiences will have to choose a character to solve the puzzles. At each stage, there were clues that helped to tell the story. The thing that triggered me in the studio was to look back at this story again and asked myself who was the protagonist of the game. Does the audience become the protagonist or was there a fixed protagonist where the audiences were just supporting characters. There were three fixed characters and the other three characters were up to the audience to choose from. Analysing the plot once again, the audience may feel that they were the hero in solving the puzzle however the protagonist of the story was the doctor, one of the fixed character in the game. The doctor was a constant character in the story and his back story was told as part of the clue to the game. The doctor was kidnapped by the aliens and was forced to create a formula to destroy the earth. At the end, the doctor was the key to saving earth because he was the creator of the formula and had to prevent the aliens from setting the bomb off.
In this case, the audience may feel that they were the main characters of the story but they were just supporting characters that help the protagonist in the story to save the world. I came across an article that explains the difference between main character and protagonist. “The main character represents the audience’s eyes into the story, the Protagonist pursues the goal of the story”, which helps to further explain the characters that the audience chooses were not the role of a protagonist (Narrative First, n.d.). The audience role was to see what kind of world there were in and how they manoeuvre in that world as the character they picked. In a game, it is easy to overlook the kind of characters you play just because you have the control to change the story line. However, there are a million possibilities to how it can turn out. Thus, it really depends on the structure of the story and characters where you can or not be the protagonist.
Narrative First. (n.d.) The True Definition of a Protagonist Retrieved from http://narrativefirst.com/articles/the-true-definition-of-a-protagonist
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