Mindstorm #1: Transmedia Writing
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Delivered as part of the Mindstorms masterclass series, part of an innovative project to develop performance work for livestreaming by SHPLive.TV. David Varela is a writer, producer of games and multimedia drama, living and working in the UK. Credits include Xi, one of the largest Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) ever made, writing and producing Lewis Hamilton: Secret Life at nDreams, Zombies, Run!, the theatrical extravaganza The Seed, and 100 Hours of Solitude in Ted Hughes old house. David also teaches, talks and runs workshops around the world.
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Mindstorm #1: Transmedia Writing
- 1. TRANSMEDIA WRITING – ON EVERY SCALE DAVID VARELA
- 2. PROJECT DATES STUDIO MARCH-NOV 2010 NDREAMS LEWIS HAMILTON: SECRET LIFE A GLOBAL ADVENTURE
- 3. HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE LEWIS?
- 4. PROBLEM 1 NO-GO AREAS ALL THE INTERESTING STUFF
- 5. PROBLEM 2 FRAGMENTED AUDIENCE IN UNUSUAL PLACES
- 6. PROBLEM 3 TIME WITH LEWIS VERY LIMITED
- 7. CREATE A PARALLEL LIFE NEW REASONS TO TRAIN SOLUTION
- 8. A CINEMATIC STORY RECOVERING STOLEN ART, IN STYLE
- 9. OR... OCEAN’S THOUSANDS THE FANS ARE IN LEWIS’S CREW
- 11. STRUCTURE REAL TIME, REAL LIFE 5 HEISTS, ONLINE & OFFLINE
- 12. REAL LIFE STREET EVENTS LIVE TREASURE HUNTS IN 12 CITIES
- 13. MEANWHILE ALL IN NINE LANGUAGES SITES, VIDEO, GAMES, TWITTER, AUDIO, MAIL ENGLIS H FRENC H ITALIAN GERMA N SPANIS H TURKIS HJAPANES E MANDARI N KOREA N
- 14. ILLUSION HIDING IN SHADOWS NOW YOU SEE HIM...
- 15. ILLUSION HIDING IN SHADOWS NOW YOU SEE HIM
- 16. SHOW US A FILM THEN
- 18. THAT ALL SOUNDS GREAT WHERE’S THE DIRT?
- 20. LAWYERS
- 21. TECHNOLOGY
- 22. COMMUNITY
- 23. SIGN-OFF
- 24. PROJECT DATES STUDIO MAY-JULY 2012 GOAT & MONKEY THEATRE THE SEED PART OF THE CULTURAL OLYMPIAD
- 25. FOUR PLAYS, FOUR GARDENS LIVE PERFORMANCES
- 26. A DIFFERENT TONE THE POWER OF SOUND
- 29. BURIED TREASURE A REAL REWARD
- 30. MEET HELEN A MODERN PLANT HUNTER
- 31. THE SEED ON FACEBOOK THIS IS NOT A HOAX
- 32. DOING IT FOR LOVE GOING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION
- 34. TECHNOLOGY
- 35. LAWYERS
- 36. SIGN-OFF
- 37. COMMUNITY
- 38. A COMPLAINT AND AN OFFER
- 39. THE FREEDOM OF FREE DOUBLING THE IMPACT
- 40. PROJECT DATES COMPANY APRIL-JUNE 2013 NOCTURN DANCE DARE YOU WATCH? A TRANSMEDIA DANCE PROJECT
- 41. THIS IS NOT A DANCE BROADENING THE AUDIENCE
- 42. SPREADING THE LOAD BUDGET STORYTELLING
- 43. SPREADING THE LOAD BUDGET STORYTELLING
- 44. SPREADING THE LOAD BUDGET STORYTELLING
- 45. AUDIENCE
- 46. CAST
- 47. THEME
- 48. STORYLINES
Editor's Notes
- Hello! Before we start... It’s really nice to have a small group here, meaning we can really talk about practical useful things for each of us. Let’s start by going round the room and just say your name, where you’re working (if that’s relevant), and why you’re here today. - So, before lunch I’m going to talk about three transmedia projects I’ve worked on – small, medium and large – which I hope will give you some ideas or raise some questions that we can talk about. Then, we’ll have a break for lunch at 12:30 and after that we’ll try to talk about any projects that *you’re* working on and any practical issues you might have.
- First, let’s start big. Lewis Hamilton: Secret Life. This is a project I made at a studio called nDreams. It was sponsored by Reebok. For those of you who might not know: Lewis Hamilton is a British Formula 1 racing driver, a former World Champion who in 2010 was with a team called McLaren, also notable as the first black driver in Formula 1. It was a big project, and I’m going to spend a few minutes giving you an overview of what it involved – focusing on the positive side. Then I’ll talk about the painful, painful lessons I learned from it so you don’t make the same mistakes. This is probably the closest I’ll ever get to writing and producing an action movie. Say what you like about Hollywood, I grew up on a diet of high-octane silliness and heist adventures, and writing that kind of story – just writing it as a straight screenplay script – is pretty tough. You need complex challenges, tight plotting, careful pacing, opportunities for excitement and danger, and, of course, characters you care about. And making the story *interactive* makes it even more difficult. Just to give you a bit of background: this opportunity came about in a rather peculiar way. And like most big opportunities, it wasn’t without strings. nDreams was approached by a PR firm called M & C Saatchi, who asked if we could help a client with a problem. The client was Reebok, and their problem was Lewis.
- Reebok sponsor Lewis as an athlete, using him to showcase their training kit and sell trainers. He’s on a five-year deal, starting in 2009, and it that first year they pretty much exhausted every aspect of Lewis’s training regime. They forced journalists to run with him up mountains and do weight training with him... He’s a very fit guy, and he does a lot of sport, but the PR people were scratching their heads about what they could say about his physical training in 2010. He was doing exactly the same thing as he was the year before. That’s not much of a story, and it wasn’t going to get them much PR attention. How could they make him interesting? Well, there were THREE PARTS TO THE PROBLEM THAT IS LEWIS...
- THE FIRST WAS THE CONTRACTUAL RESTRICTIONS. Reebok couldn’t mention Formula 1 , even though he’s surrounded by it. (Reebok had no deal with McLaren, only with Lewis as an individual.) Or his private life – especially not his girlfriend, the Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger. So the two things he’s famous for, we couldn’t talk about. Or link him to anything at all scandalous or risque to grab headlines – there were other sponsors to think about. We couldn’t risk damaging his public image at all.
- THE SECOND PROBLEM was that Formula 1 is a global sport – everywhere EXCEPT the USA. Pockets of support in very disparate countries: places like Malaysia, Egypt, India, Turkey... Very different cultures, hard to communicate with all at once. Especially when we had ZERO media budget. No bought space, no advertising, no tie-in with a broadcaster...
- And the third problem... For their money, Reebok get one six-hour day with Lewis each year, plus six one-hour slots throughout the season. That’s to do everything – photo shoots for catalogues and posters, product launches.... There are a lot of demands on his time.
- So this was our solution: we created a parallel, fictional life that would give Lewis new reasons to train. Something to make the training itself more varied and interesting. And it would avoid all those no-go areas, cover the world, and make the most of Lewis’s limited time.
- Basically, we turned him into an action hero – in a cinematic style. The story was that Lewis, in between F1 races, was recovering stolen works of art from around the world. He’d have the modern edge of Jason Bourne, with the flair of Thomas Crown and the physical training dedication of Rocky. (You can hear the pitch now, can’t you?)
- Another cinematic influence was Ocean’s 11 – but in our case, we were turning Lewis’s thousands of fans into part of his crew, helping him plan and pull off some amazing heists. We also created a couple of fictional characters to help Lewis, including Anna there (his right-hand woman), and Joe (his trainer).
- SO, HOW DO YOU PLAY A GAME LIKE THIS? First of all, it’s worth saying that this whole thing was free to take part in. They worked collectively to help Lewis. If one person made a breakthrough, they all benefited and the story moved on.
- During the 8-month Formula 1 season, Lewis pulled off 5 heists. First one was in March, the final one in November, and each heist took about six weeks from start to finish. And to help Lewis, the players had to overcome a mixture of challenges and puzzles online and out in the real world. The structure of each heist was roughly like this: First, Anna would announce that something has been nicked, using her blog on SecretLewis.com. There you see Thierry Henry doing a little cameo for us, telling Lewis that his sculpture had been stolen. Then the detective work begins – and this part was really varied, all kinds of challenges usually marshaled by Anna. For example, we have here an online photofit game where you had to recreate the face of a suspect... And that rose represents a music challenge, where we asked players to compose a love song as a favour to a character who might give us blueprints to the target’s apartment. There were dozens of mini-games like this during the adventure, all completely different. Then Joe would design a training program for this specific heist, and put up an exercise video for Lewis (and the players) – because each heist involved a different physical obstacle he had to train to overcome... And Anna would create a Heist Simulator game based on the target location, modeling each heist and letting the players play through it as Lewis, finding the smartest route for Lewis to take when he finally conducted the heist. There was this 3D version of the heist sim on SecretLewis.com and also one for Java phones – the old, non-smart phones – which actually got us a huge additional audience, especially in India.
- Sometimes that detective work in the middle meant people getting out of their homes and looking for clues or characters in their cities. We ran a dozen events like this is London, Birmingham, Paris, Milan, Kuala Lumpur, Barcelona, Dubai, Cairo, Beirut, Bangalore, Mumbai and New Delhi.
- And we were telling this story in 9 languages simultaneously. English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Turkish, Japanese, Mandarin and Korean. That’s what got us those hard-to-reach audiences. (And it also drove me slightly insane.)
- We only had one six-hour day with Lewis, in Geneva – we got that six-hour day! – to shoot all the video and photos we would use for the whole game. We also got an unexpected hour with him in Barcelona in the summer and about five minutes of his time in Abu Dhabi. That was the lot. But because the bulk of this story was told through websites and Twitter and emails, and he wore a hood a lot of the time, we could create the illusion that Lewis was talking to the players a lot more than he really was. When in reality...
- It was just some skinny English guy throwing his voice. Because that’s what a storyteller does in a story like this. There was a lot of writing text in character, but it was a very visual and cinematic story. Words, sometimes, just weren’t the best way to get that sense of excitement across. So...
- This is a film festival, so I’m going to show you a film. At the end of each episode – after the players had done all the detective work and figured out the best route for him – Lewis conducted the heist as they planned it and Anna posted a video of it online. That was the climax of the episode. Those heist videos are a couple of minutes long, and each one is a mini-movie in itself.... But we don’t have time for that, so I’m just going to show you a trailer we cut together for the start of the game – it’s only a minute long, but it will give you an idea of the very cinematic style we went for.
- So that was the positive side. But there were some serious problems. There were fundamental flaws in the way the game was designed and run. Because I was the writer and producer, I have to take responsibility for *some* of them, at least. There are certainly things I would have done differently given the choice. For example...
- An interactive story, by definition, needs an audience – that’s what gives it life. So PR, marketing, advertising is vital part of telling your story. It’s how you get people hooked. It’s the prologue – so as a writer or producer, you have to think carefully about how and where you get your audience... And from my experience of this project, I’d say don’t let somebody else write that prologue for you. Use paid advertising space you can control, if possible – though it wasn’t in this case. If somebody is writing a press release or giving an interview introducing the game, *be there* - they’re telling your story. Another restriction on Reebok’s contract with Lewis was that we not only couldn’t mention Formula 1, but we couldn’t talk to the Formula 1 press. We couldn’t talk to his fan clubs. We couldn’t talk to any motoring magazines or websites. The one audience who would have loved this story – we couldn’t talk to. So that was frustrating. One good way of attracting attention and getting an audience is to offer prizes. And with Reebok, we planned to give away hundreds of pairs of trainers and t-shirts and one big prize of a training day with Lewis himself. Which brings me to the next problem...
- Before the Lewis game, we consulted & paid an expert UK games lawyer about running exactly this kind of prize draw. He said it would be fine... And he was wrong. I’m not going to name him because it is PROBABLY A REALLY BAD IDEA to criticise a lawyer in public. We were running a global game, and it turns out that every country has very specific rules about how prize draws are run. This may have changed, but in France, for example, you have to inform the authorities several weeks before you start advertising, and in Italy there are very strict laws about advertising anything that could be considered a ‘lottery’. We only discovered this when we talked to a ‘prize fulfilment’ company – the people who would contact the winners, get their addresses and send out the prizes. They estimated that the legal costs and delivery costs of the trainers would come to over $200,000. So we thought, okay, maybe we’ll just have one prize: the training day with Lewis. Until we discovered that if you run any kind of international prize draw that includes Spain, you must guarantee that someone from Spain will win a prize. Which is a problem when there is only one prize. So, no prizes (or at least none that we could advertise). Which meant we attracted a smaller audience, which means the community wasn’t as interactive and lively as it might have been.
- There were also problems with technology – which is fairly common in a project of this scale, but we could have made our lives easier than we did. For example, we produced some great videos and Reebok only wanted them to be shown on a video player called Brightcove. (They didn’t want the videos on YouTube because then other companies’ advertising could appear on it, and people might post insulting comments... They didn’t want that risk.) Unfortunately, Brightcove didn’t work on mobile devices. And it didn’t work in China, which was one of their big target markets. Something that *was* more our fault... We tried using a platform called Unity to build that 3D heist simulator game. It’s a kind of high-powered version of Flash, a brilliant piece of software and I recommend you trying it out if you get the chance... BUT, back when we were launching this game, Unity was very unfamiliar to the general public – and when they first went to start the game, they were asked to download the Unity plug-in for their browser – which is perfectly harmless, but *a lot* of people looked at that and thought, “No thanks.” It’s now a very widely used bit of software and I think the plug-in is built into some browsers now, but back then – we were ahead of our time. And not in a good way. By contrast, the Java mobile version of the heist simulator games – the ugly, 2D version for really basic phones – was hugely popular. That awkward, old technology probably got us an extra 100,000 players.
- Working in 9 languages IS TOUGH. Rather than managing one community, YOU’RE MANAGING MULTIPLE COMMUNITIES and it’s sometimes really difficult to encourage them to work together. Ideally, you want to provide a place where everybody can talk to each other – but that is expensive. You have to moderate the community, and for us, we couldn’t afford to have full-time moderators in 9 languages for 8 months. Also, some languages really don’t communicate – they’re too culturally different. During the whole game, I can’t remember any Korean players talking to the Turkish, for example. They just don’t share a common language. So we tried to find existing forums and messageboards and communities that might be interested in playing host to the conversations between players in each language. But again, we faced the same restrictions: we couldn’t use Formula 1 websites, or Lewis Hamilton fan groups. It was really difficult to find websites that would commit to running our communities. And it was even harder for those communities to find each other in different languages, spread out all over the web. So we ended up with several small communities, separated by language. And small communities are difficult to sustain. They suffer from ‘empty room syndrome’ – you know, when you walk past a restaurant and it’s completely dead? Or there’s one guy at the back reading a book? You don’t go in. And I think each of our communities suffered from that. They didn’t reach the critical mass required to make them really exciting. Of course, it wasn’t just the players who were separated by language: *I* was separated from most of them too. I’m afraid I don’t speak Italian, German, Spanish, Turkish, Japanese, Mandarin or Korean – so if we were going to communicate with the players in those languages, we had to get everything translated, which in this case, took a *week*. That’s because of the particular translation agency we were using – we didn’t have these lovely translators working with us simultaneously. And on top of that...
- Everything that we wrote or designed had to be signed off by the client before it could go live. And in this case, there were many clients. There was Reebok’s PR team and Legal team; then there was M&C Saatchi, the PR agency; then Lewis management; then Mclaren, who had the power to veto anything; and if we were planning something overseas, then it might have to go through the Reebok office in that country too. We streamlined this process down to a week. But with the translation cycle as well, that meant that if I wrote anything new, the players wouldn’t see it for two weeks. And that’s not interactive. That’s broadcast. We had 9 twitter feeds – one in each language, and all pretty useless. Twitter is a conversation platform, and we were unable to respond. And when you don’t acknowledge people on twitter, that’s actively insulting to your audience. It’s like they’ve gone to give you a High-5 and you’ve left them hanging. I hated that. - Now – I think you’ve heard quite enough of my negativity. So , bearing in mind all that... THIS IS WHAT I DID LAST SUMMER.
- The Seed. It started in May and it finished around the 27 th of July because that was the first day of the Olympics – and this project was part of the Cultural Olympiad. I don’t want it to sound too grand – there were hundreds of cultural events included in the Olympiad. This was a much lower-budget production than the Lewis Hamilton project, and it’s mainly funded by the Arts Council of England. The aim of the Olympiad is to highlight and promote British culture, including our history and scientific achievements, and therefore encourage tourism. And The Seed did that by telling the stories of some real-life, genuine Victorian plant hunters, who, over a hundred years ago, risked their lives to find (and sometimes steal) rare plants and seeds to bring back to Britain. It’s *mostly* a true story. To make this happen, I worked with a theatre company called Goat & Monkey. They make great site-specific shows, but they’d never done anything quite like this before... And as you can see there , we were telling the story in three ways: with a treasure hunt, an online game and a series of live performances. I’ll go through those now.
- Starting with the LIVE PERFORMANCES... I wrote four plays about the lives of four plant hunters, and each one was performed in one of four amazing gardens just outside London. These gardens are fascinating places, and are home to thousands of the plants that these Victorian adventurers discovered. The gardens are all very close to each other, and they’re known collectively as the ‘Great Gardens of Sussex’. One of them – Wakehurst Place – is also home to the Millennium Seed Bank, which is a scientific institute collecting and storing samples of every plant in the world. All the gardens are gorgeous and make a fantastic backdrop for the drama. There was a new play every two weeks – the first one was at the start of June and the last one in the middle of July. Each play stands on its own as a piece of entertainment, telling its own story, but together, the four plays are chapters in a single story, with some of the same characters featuring again and again. In every play, there are references to one particular seed – The Seed of the title – which I think they were all looking for. That’s *my* addition. That’s fiction. Each play is quite different in style. This photo is from the first play, called One for Sorrow , which is actually quite a comical love story. The audience followed the performers through the garden from scene to scene. And because the gardens were open to the public at the same time, we used radio headsets for the audience and microphones for the actors, so they could always be heard. That meant we could also mix in music and sound effects to create a really cinematic atmosphere.
- We used headphones again in the second play, which is called The Lost Fortune – but the tone here was very different. This was much darker, following an adventurer into a forest and hearing him go mad and possibly die. Again, the headphones let us create a lot of the atmosphere and made it much more immersive. I don’t know if you know the work of Punchdrunk Theatre – they’re a fantastic company who make big immersive shows such as Sleep No More , which is running in New York now. But the team who run Goat & Monkey went to university with the Punchdrunk guys and they share a lot of the same ideas and values. At Punchdrunk, they give the audience masks, which helps to separate them from the performance – and I think our radio headphones performed a similar purpose. They let the audience feel like they were part of the action – they could hear a performer whispering in their ear – but it made them feel separate from it too. And separate from the other audience members. There was very little conversation between audience members, even when they were walking from one scene to the next. They were very deeply absorbed in the action. I’ve worked on a few projects now that combine headphones and real life action, and I think it’s a very powerful form.
- This is the third play. This is deliberately very old-fashioned – just a man sitting by a campfire telling you a story. It makes it very intimate, very personal. But by setting it up as a basic storytelling performance, we were able to surprise the audience when we did use a bit of technology. So we used some video projections and sound effects when he took you inside his rather claustrophobic tent to create the sense of a much bigger world. There’s one point when this character, George Forrest, is attacked by a group of warrior monks in Tibet and he’s surrounded and the monks are cutting the hearts out of his companions while they’re still alive – I’m not making this part up, this absolutely happened to George Forrest when he was in Tibet – and we were able to surround the audience with sound and moving silhouettes and made them feel as trapped and frightened as George might have done. Simple tricks, very effective.
- And the fourth and final show was much bigger and had an audience of a couple of hundred people each night, with a much larger cast and the story was told almost entirely in poetry and song. And we had fireworks and a scene where the whole audience had to cross a smoky battlefield through mortar rounds and gunfire. It was awesome. But MOST IMPORTANTLY, all four plays contained clues to the whereabouts of The Seed...
- And the seed happened to be inside this rather beautiful piece of hand-made gold jewellery. It was buried somewhere in the UK, and by following the clues in the plays, the audience were able to figure out where the treasure was hidden. BUT they had a much better chance if they also followed the online story, which was the third part of this project – and the most interactive...
- This is Helen Furnival. She is 27 years old, she works at the Millennium Seed Bank as a researcher, and she is completely fictional. For ten weeks last summer, I played the role of Helen – with the assistance of an actress called Tam who provided some photos and recorded a few scripted video clips. And in that time, Helen discovered ancient secrets and led the audience through her own adventure as she found old documents about the Victorian plant hunters and their attempts to find the seed over a hundred years ago. Most of the interaction between Helen and the audience took place through Facebook...
- And here’s Helen’s page. Well, actually, as you can see this is marked as *The Seed’s* Facebook page, and under Helen’s profile picture there you can see that she is categorised by Facebook as a *Fictional character* - I didn’t want anyone thinking that this was a real-life story because, well, Helen got quite distressed at times and I wouldn’t want people to worry. So almost every day I was writing quite long status updates – blog posts, really – as Helen on this site. And I responded to comments and answering private messages and just having a big conversation with the audience. They know it’s fiction and I know it’s fiction but it’s a lot of fun. I took this screenshot yesterday and you can see she has over 6000 fans now. By the end of the July last year she had 5,000 and, even though she hasn’t posted an update or anything since then, she’s still accumulating more ‘likes’. But I have *really, really* enjoyed these conversations...
- ...And I love The Seed – even though there are many compelling reasons why I shouldn’t. It meant putting huge amounts of time and effort into entertaining a pretty small audience, especially compared to the 600,000+ people who played the Lewis game. I didn’t make a lot of money out of it. Each of the four plays only had a short run, so we didn’t getting theatre reviewers coming to shows, so we never got any kind of recognition in the press. It was ephemeral. In fact the whole thing was probably a really bad idea. BUT... Running a small project like this does have some advantages over a large project.
- Let’s compare The Seed with the problems I had with Lewis Hamilton. First of all: the importance of getting an audience. The wonderful thing about The Seed, because it was a subsidised art project, is that there’s safety net to take risks. Yes, we had target numbers and ideals, but they were targets we set ourselves and weren’t the only measure of success. We weren’t trying to sell anything, so we weren’t pushing a brand in people’s faces. Also: this is a very different kind of audience to the teenage boys we were targeting with Lewis Hamilton. The people who visit these gardens and who are interested in gardening tend to be older. The Facebook part of the project is probably the most high-tech, and you’d think it would be the part that most appeals to young people – gamers – but when you look at the data, you see that the people who ‘liked’ the page were *mostly female* and over a quarter of our audience on Facebook was aged over 45 – at least they were until we suddenly became popular in Pakistan for some reason and that skewed all our statistics.
- And Facebook is pretty much the only technology we used – which makes things very cheap, apart from anything else. There were none of the problems of people being unfamiliar with the technology, or finding that it doesn’t work on their phone – Facebook is familiar and it’s everywhere. You can post text or photos or video, and you automatically get that social effect of people sharing. People are used to engaging in conversation on Facebook. It’s a self-moderating forum. It’s comfortable. It’s not revolutionary – and again, it’s a backward step in terms of the sophistication of the technology that I’ve been using in the past – but it *works*. And it’s saved me a lot of headaches. The one other piece of technology I used was *ebooks*. Every time a new play comes out, I published the script on Kindle, through Amazon. It is incredibly easy to do, and it’s very simple for the audience to download. They don’t even need a Kindle, because there are free Kindle readers for PC and Mac and even phones. And it meant that if anyone couldn’t make it to the show, or if they lived overseas and wanted to follow the story closely, they could. Or if they just wanted the script as a souvenir.
- There were NO LAWYERS involved in The Seed. I didn’t speak to a single one, and I can’t tell you how happy that made me. We had to fill in some health & safety paperwork for the plays, but that’s it. *So good.*
- And there was almost no sign-off process. Instead of waiting two weeks for permission, I could reply to a message in two seconds. This is the benefit of working on an *art* project, not a *commercial* project. You’re trusted like an *artist* not monitored like an *employee*. It’s liberating. Another thing that’s great about working on a lower-budget project is that the audience’s expectations are lower as well. For the first five weeks, Helen was working at the Millennium Seed Bank, mainly stuck in a room going through archive papers. So when she found out that there might be more information in Shanghai, she asked on Facebook if anyone knew someone in Shanghai who could help. And when they couldn’t... The audience was very surprised when Helen jumped on a plane to Shanghai. In Week 6 she was posting videos of herself in Shanghai and the audience reaction was one of genuine surprise – they didn’t think we were that adventurous (or had a big enough budget for that).
- And all of that helped build a great community. They’re fairly mature and educated which makes them very interesting to talk to, and I *could* talk to them, which was great. Some of the conversations we had on Facebook were twenty, thirty messages long, conducted very quickly, and it gave me a real buzz to chat like that (and I think it gave them a buzz too). Compared to the one-way *broadcasting* we were doing with Lewis, just shouting at the audience and not listening, this felt much more personal. I imagine it’s like being an actor on film or on TV, never seeing the audience, and then going to act in a theatre production. The audience is right there – like you are now. You get to see them react in real time; and they can watch you improvise and I think they appreciate that skill. But also, the biggest relief of this whole project was that I only had to do it in ONE LANGUAGE. Dealing with nine languages for Lewis was not good for my sanity, so I was really enjoying writing only in English. And then, on the third day of the project, I got a complaint...
- Somebody in Canada complained that the French translation provided by Facebook was terrible. Facebook offers automatic translation of posts, powered by Bing, and Bing is not nearly as intelligent or talented as a real human translator. And Ginette here was so annoyed by how bad the translation was – and so interested in the story already – that she volunteered to translate every part of the story into French, live, as I wrote it. I was very happy to let her! As it turns out, Ginette is a playwright and a teacher and she runs a French-Canadian theatre group in Quebec. So not only did she translate all of Helen’s posts on facebook, but she also translated the plays and staged readings in Quebec in parallel with the performances in the UK.
- Here she is - in the middle, in pink – with some of the young actors and students she was working with. I’ve never met Ginette and there’s a good chance that I never will. But she worked faster than a professional translation company, she didn’t cost our production anything at all, and she’s used the project as an educational tool that’s helped students to learn more about interactive drama thousands of miles away. And because I own the rights to the script along with Goat & Monkey – and because there were no lawyers involved – I was able to let her do this. She’s now looking at adapting and staging a version of The Seed for a Canadian audience in Canadian gardens, with their own version of Helen on Facebook and their own treasure hunt. That’s what I really love about The Seed. It was *truly* interactive, to the point where members of the audience had the freedom to take it away and make their own entertainment from it. *I* had the freedom not just to talk to the audience, but to give rights away. And that doubled the audience, doubled the longevity of the project, and I love the idea that it’s being used for teaching and not selling trainers. Selling trainers is fine, but... This feels worthwhile. And it’s a development that I never intended to happen – I wish I could say that I planned it, but no. It has purely come from the creativity and enthusiasm of the audience, and that is the bonus you get from opening up your work like this. You can never tell where the audience will take you.
- And this is the third project, which is a bit smaller than the other but maybe more relevant to some of you here: a dance project. I’m going to be quite careful talking about this one because it’s being run by John Darvell of Nocturn Dance – hello, John – and it’s very much his baby; and also we’re in the middle of the project right now. As you can see, it doesn’t end until June. So John, correct me if I’m wrong on any of this... But I think it’s fair to say that this is a low-budget project, yes...?
- Sorry for any spoilers here, but... Dare You Watch is a dance production which will take place right here where we’re sitting on the 31 May and 1 June. Nocturn Dance is coordinating it, combining a small cast of professional performers and several community dance groups. It’s a two-day event that will be live-streamed for about 8 hours each day, as part of the SHP Live programme. You’ll be able to watch at dareyouwatch.com. But the dance is only part of the story. It’s the climax of the story, but the story has already started and is happening right now. A bit like The Seed, there is a story unfolding online – mainly on Facebook – where characters from the story are happily living their lives and chatting to anyone who wants to get in touch. There are five characters – well, five and a half – and I’ll talk about them in a minute. But maybe the most interesting thing about the way this story is presented is that it isn’t obvious that it’s a dance production. You have to dig quite deep to find that it’s being run by Nocturn Dance. All you’re initially presented with are the dates and the title and these rather bleak, disturbing images and the message ‘She is coming’. They’re designed to rouse people’s curiosity. John wanted to reach a broader audience than the usual dance crowd, so he wanted a story that would draw people in before they realised it was a dance production. He just wanted to attract people who like a bit of mystery.
- So here is the main Facebook page for Dare You Watch. A few things to point out: You can see there that it’s clocked up 2,784 likes so far, so those are all people who will potentially see an item in their news feed when this page is updated. You’ll also see that this is classified as a Community page. Facebook has several different types of page you can create – for you and me, that’s normally a ‘personal profile’ – and you saw how Helen Furnival in The Seed was marked as a ‘fictional character’. And there, in the blurb about the page, you can see that it says ‘something special is coming!’ There’s still no obvious indication that this is a dance production.
- Here I’ve just scrolled down the page so you can see some of the messages that have been posted on the page. Again, forgive the spoilers, but John runs this page himself. This page is the god-like omniscient narrator of the story, and as you can see here, he can refer to and link to all of the characters who also have their own pages on Facebook. Here you can see Benedict Nichols, Lucinda Butler, Sasha Tavish and Liam Sanderson all mentioned. The fun thing about this god-like point of view is that the characters themselves don’t realise that they are connected yet. All of them have been living their own individual lives for the past few weeks and none of them know that their paths are all going to collide on the 31 May. Half the fun is watching their lives converge. So let’s take a look at their lives... The one character who isn’t mentioned on this page is Serena Westcott, so let’s look at her...
- There she is. Serena has been having some dating problems and so she’s been asking for advice on what dress to wear and how to make up for her terrible mistake of mixing champagne with her medication. So they each have their own interesting stories for the audience to follow. And the great thing is that this page is being written by the dancer who will be playing the role of Serena in the final production. And the same goes for each of the other characters’ pages – they’re all being maintained by the performer who will be playing that character. Or rather, they’re already playing that character. Unlike The Seed, where I *wrote* Helen Furnival and a different person *played* her, here each performer gets to inhabit their role long before the curtain rises. Serena and Liam and Sasha and Benedict and Lucinda were all created collaboratively by a combination of John, me and the cast. I’ll just give you a quick insight into how these characters came about.
- We started with the audience. John already had an idea of the kind of audience he wanted to attract, and he set out five types of characters accordingly. We had a young geeky man in his 20s; a sporty woman of about the same age; an outdoorsy kind of woman in her 40s; an older man maybe in his 50s with an office job; and another woman in her 30s who might be quite upper class.
- Then there was the cast, who naturally influenced the type of characters we could have – not just by their age and gender but by their personality too. The show was only half cast when we started talking about character, so sometimes the character changed to match the performer and sometimes the performer was cast to match the character. And once they were all in the rehearsal room, they could start devising character traits that would change them from being a ‘demographic type’ into a realistic person.
- But there was a need for some unifying organisation to make these characters coherently part of the same world and the same story. John wanted to have a theme of *brain-washing* (again, I don’t want to spoil the story too much) and so each character typified a different form of brain-washing: Benedict is interested in Derren Brown-style mind control Sasha is all about mind over matter, no pain no gain mental discipline Lucinda practices meditation and wants to go astral travelling Liam is in complete denial about something which I won’t spoil here And Serena is on personality-altering medication. The DareYouWatch page has a characteristic voice too, as a kind of narrator, and its form of brainwashing is all about class superiority and rules and institutionalisation: ‘Follow the instructions,’ ‘Do not obstruct the doors’ – that’s it’s tone of voice.
- And the other thing holding the characters together are their individual storylines. Each character has been online since early in April and will be telling their story for 8 weeks, concluding on 31 May. While the characters never meet, they do end up having some overlapping experiences and so coordinating and interweaving their storylines over the 8 weeks was also important. Here’s a quick peek behind the scenes...
- So bearing in mind the audience, the cast, the theme and where we wanted all the characters to end up, I wrote each character a really short outline of what they would do each week – just a few lines, as you can see – and in this case a particular question she could ask the audience that week as well. Questions are a good way of encouraging interaction, and work especially well with a neurotic character like Lucinda here. So each performer got a one-page document like this outlining their story – but beyond that, day to day, the performer was in charge of what their character said. I gave a few tips about tone of voice, but largely they found the voice of the character themselves. Now, not only is this a great way of getting the cast in touch with their characters; it’s also quite economical. While I spent *weeks* running a single character for The Seed (losing quite a lot of sleep) I’ve only spent a few days working on Dare You Watch: the bulk of the storytelling has been shared between John and the cast. It’s a real collaborative effort.
- And the great thing about it is that the story keeps running even when John and I are busy doing other things, like now. In the lunch break or whenever, I heartily recommend visiting facebook.com/dareyouwatch and chatting with some of the characters. I have no idea what they’ll say in reply. Get stuck in. John: is that a fair summary? Now – I’m very aware that I’ve been yakking away for an hour now, so I’ll shut up. Do you have any questions about anything I’ve talked about here: Lewis, The Seed, Dare You Watch, anything...? {Maybe discuss the details of Facebook ads?}
- AND IF YOU’D LIKE TO BE PART OF THAT AUDIENCE, FIND DYW ON FACEBOOK! Or me on twitter or the web. Thanks very much