The basics of Narrative

Seth recently emailed me a very intriguing link to a a seminar held by SCAD featuring Cindy Chastain, a self-proclaimed "Experience Designer" who presented a talk on the fundamentals of narrative and how they can be applied to any design context to produce something "that engages the minds and emotions of users."

I found the talk very conceptual and highly informative. One of Chastain's claims is that there are a number of debates that exist about the value and place of storytelling in interactive design. She acknowledges that there are 3 ways in which storytelling is used to shape the product: the first is storytelling as a form of research; the second is storytelling as a means to describe how the product fits into the reader's lifestyle (this works more for advertising but still applies to other interactive products); and the third is the reader's story, a stream of cognitive thought which occurs as a user interacts with a product.

This third aspect of storytelling's place in interactive design is what Chastain belives is the most important and she makes a point of this by asking the question "How can we as designer's, provide cues that will deepen the narrative connection?" This point is the most relevant to our Major K-Film project at the moment as we are attempting to utilise the Korsakow software in a completely new way than how it has been used before by trying to entertain an audience in the same way a traditional film does.

To help build these cues, Chastain suggests that audiences do not strive for experience with interactive design; rather, they desire engagement, a collaboration of emotional and cognitive methods that occur when a reader views a storytelling product. Chastain believes that our response to a story is all about the stucture and how it has been built. By understanding the way a story is to be designed allows us to then control the emotional response that the reader will have on the other end.

Looking at this in relation to our K-Film projects, I can see how important this last part is. We are all new to the concept of Korsakow. The sky's the limit in terms of what can be achieved with this new software which means exploring how a narrative can be formed from using the software. In recent tutes, my K-Film group and I have been diligently examining every possible way in which meaning and engagement can be created from a K-Film and so far, we believe we have come up with a unique situation. What we want to try and achieve is to take a traditional narrative and translate it into a K-Film narrative, or non-linear if you want to get techincal.
We thought the best way to go about this was to take a simple 21st century love story which has the following main events: couple fall in love, get married, husband cheats, wife finds out at leaves him. These 4 scenes will eventually become our keywords in the K-film but that's stepping a little too far ahead. What we then thought is we can segment each 4 scenes into 15 mini-scenes if you like which will make up the 60 videos we need for the entire project. The aim of these videos is to make them ambiguous as possible so that the narrative pathway that occurs does not affect the meaning created from the original 60 clips.
There are a number of issues that can arise from doing this however, ones which I have already explored can be found in this week's post. Since then, we have recently had a class discussion about our group's aim for the project and the comment was made that it will be really difficult for us to ensure the clips do feature this ambiguity. I think to combat this successfully, we will need to be extremely aware of continuity, framing and composition as these elements will be the ones to affect the meaning of the narrative most. To do this, we are planning to run the shoot in the exact same way you would a normal film starting with 2 actors, making a list of shots and keeping to a shooting schedule and then keeping a continuity log as well. In doing all of this we hope to creat the 60 clips in a way that they can then be viewed in any sequence which will ultimately create millions of variations on the one story.

All in all, Cindy Chastain's seminar was a really great eye-opener about how narrative and storytelling can be integrated into your work and I sincerely suggest anyone who is interested in creating narrative with new media forms explores her work and the seminar.