The Story Lab 2016 – Blog Post Week Eight

This week was a little all over the place in regards to The Story Lab. Our first class I unfortunately missed thanks to Metro (5 hour train trip and missing class is not my idea of fun), and our second class for the week involved listening and presenting project pitches.

In regards to the pitches, I thought it was a really interesting experience. Of course receiving feedback from those in the industry in regards to our own project was interesting and extremely useful, but I found that listening to the feedback given to other groups was just as insightful and intriguing.

One particular mode of feedback that was repeated throughout the pitches was that of ethical responsibility. For anyone putting anything out there, of course morals and ethics are big players. However, when it came to listening to the pitches, this wasn’t something that popped into my mind, which I put mainly down to the fact that I knew these projects for what they were – projects. But as was raised numerously, the general public and audience have no idea what they are stumbling into, and are blind to the assignment at hand. Us, as storytellers, have no way of knowing for certain how our narrative is going to be taken, or by whom it will be consumed by. Obviously, we’ve stressed this numerously, but it wasn’t until I looked at it from this perspective that it really stuck.
In terms of our project then, we will have to make note of somewhere on artefacts (especially tangible ones, those left in the real world) that they are fictional.

Though similar, another point I took from the presentations was the idea of safety and responsibility towards audiences. Making sure that the “missions” or “adventures” we send our audiences on has to be a prime factor, no matter their abilities, after all, we are responsible for where audiences go and when. This really became a factor when the concept of a participant using their smartphone through the city was raised. While the idea was brilliant and fascinating, it was questioned whether making an audience member walk around, staring at their screen through the city would be safe.

While the points raised were generally common sense questions and nothing that were overly earth-shattering, they were ideas and concepts that needed to be taken very seriously. However, just for my own two cents, it does make me question where audiences need to draw the line on their own personal responsibility. Of course no group will knowingly send their participants into ‘the jaws of death’ so to speak, so if a safe course is provided and an accident still occurs, how much of that accident is audience fault, and how much of it is designer fault? Because after all accidents happen.