Throughout the studio our group aimed to create a transmedia narrative that incorporated elements of an escape room. This involved a heavy usage on puzzles as a means of getting our narrative across. However, we aimed not to create an escape room exactly, but rather sought to use puzzles as only a means of giving the players/audience a sense of agency. Further narrative development was established by other platforms such as video/audio and journals – what our main challenge was how to link everything together to create a story.
Our statement at the beginning of the semester was quite broad. We aimed to simply create a transmedia narrative across different mediums by analyzing and experimenting with different types of platforms to see what worked and what didn’t, which I felt that we did. There was a lot of trial and error processing as we worked on trying to link everything together. We started off with establishing which platforms would be best in order to enhance and tell our story – the main platforms being: video,audio,journals and puzzles.
Our experimentation and trials lead us to several dead ends which we had to analyse in order to move on. Examples would be, if we had an idea for our puzzle and developed it, we would find that our narrative would change and subsequently the videos/audio with it. This happened the same if we changed our scripts for each of the videos and audios, we would have to drastically change our puzzles and it would just be an endless process of going back and forth.
Ultimately we had to overcome this problem by simply sticking to a narrative or puzzle set and building and centering everything around that rather than trying to find ways in which it can work together. In our case we based everything – journals, puzzles, audio/video on a script and story layout that I had created and which we went over and all agreed on. There weren’t really any other large issues that we faced in working on this project – but the whole process of getting everything to work together was proved to be a much larger obstacle than what we had anticipated. Whether or not our solution to this problem works, we can’t afford to change anything at this point given time and resource constraints. But that’s what a prototype is for.
Overall I believe we have achieved our goal that we set in our original statement. Although we were faced with many obstacles on the way, we managed to solve and get around them, even if it meant taking a step back. There weren’t really any issues regarding group members and meet ups thankfully, I feel we managed to effectively work together as a team and create a narrative based on many different elements that we researched on and applied.