But I’ll talk about all of our lessons in the final post of this series. In hindsight I think I would have added more characters and subplots and a few less locations. It was also important that the audience member could be any age, any gender, any race and still feel a part of the story.
At all times I wanted to audience to feel like an observer, trying to mind their own business.
This was really important to nail down, but made tougher by the fact that the forest at times was pretty open. Characters needed to enter and exit each scene with motivated reasons so that the loops could feel endless and organic.There were a few things I had in mind that I think were extraordinarily helpful in the design of this interactive narrative. This is how we coined the term “mesh narrative”.Īt this stage there was certainly a lot of plot holes and work still to be done. This was a new kind of storytelling much closer to the immersive theater productions I had been inspired by. This wasn’t a branched narrative, in which the audience is given a binary choice that creates a tree. Our audience could engage with the story in a number of ways, coming from many different locations on our map. The structure morphed a few times as we played with subplots, additional characters, and how exactly we were going to communicate all this information to our audience.īy the time we took a look at all our scenes and how they were fitting together, we ended up with a map that looked like a mesh net of interwoven story beats. Coincidently, we ended up with 12 deaths and one way out, for a total of 13 unique endings. We planned our grid so that you would be boxed in by deaths. Making sure that certain scenes wouldn’t happen until those milestones were met was important to keep the story coherent.Įach time we would hit a major plot point, we would change out several of the squaresĮventually you’d either be killed by the demon or cultist character, or you’d find your way out of the forest. For example, the “inciting incident” of Brian getting his arm hurt (an indication that this was not going to end well for our characters), the summoning of the demon, and then the death of one or both of our characters were all moments that move the horror narrative forward and that we wanted the audience to experience on some level. This forced us to think in “Act Breaks”, which helped define the narrative story structure we were after.
So on our whiteboard we duplicated our grid anytime a major event happened. We quickly realized that we had to design the narrative in a way that would transform into act breaks and then close up the grid so someone watching doesn’t accidentally ruin the building of the tension by getting lost and hopelessly wandering in circles. We begin by pointing at locations on the grid and saying “Let’s hear scary whispers in this square!”, or “This is where she summons the demon,” etc.
Our story was going to be about a couple lost in the woods who accidentally summon a demon. We had built some excellent relationships with horror projects we’ve done ( Paranormal Activity, The Parksville Murders, The Off Season) so we decided to lean into the horror genre and also have the opportunity to work again with talented people we love. The first outlines that would become Speak of the Devil
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