In 2006, while I was working on my PhD, interviewing readers and recording their reactions to the interactive fictions I was studying, CEMP offered me the chance to devise and run a project - the initial aim was to extend BU to the local community, perhaps widening access to Media School courses. The content of the project was up to me, and it seemed like a great opportunity to see what we could with interactive narratives: what if we allowed some school kids the chance to run amok with the concept of stories that can be told in all media, and which can be interacted with?
We armed the 14-year-old students of Portland Royal Manor College with digital cameras, DV cameras, Apple Macs, sound recording gear etc., and asked them to write stories that could make use of all these media, and which could be interactive.
I had the support of Jon Wardle and Chris Wensley at CEMP, and the technical skills of four undergraduate students from our BA in Interactive Media. The undergraduates designed two interface 'templates' in Flash, which the school students would be able to 'fill' with their story content. As you will see if you follow the link, one template was a comic-book style, the other a scrapbook style. These allowed the students to write their stories knowing in advance how the interactive screen would roughly look, and build their content appropriately.
For 14-year-olds at the school, the approach I took to explain what an interactive narrative might be was to say that it's like a journey from school to home, but on the way all kinds of things could happen which might delay you, send you off down side roads, you might pop in to see your gran, or be confronted by a rabid bunny (Portlanders don't like rabbits, and don't use the word 'rabbit' either).
I worked with the school to brief the students, and to help them prepare their stories, using print outs of the templates to aid their 'scripting'. Then, in a very busy production week, we did the filming, recorded sound, took photos, wrote words, and filled the templates with interactive content.
Have a look at what the 14-year-old (and our talented undergrads) achieved:
http://cemp.ac.uk/inp/
We armed the 14-year-old students of Portland Royal Manor College with digital cameras, DV cameras, Apple Macs, sound recording gear etc., and asked them to write stories that could make use of all these media, and which could be interactive.
I had the support of Jon Wardle and Chris Wensley at CEMP, and the technical skills of four undergraduate students from our BA in Interactive Media. The undergraduates designed two interface 'templates' in Flash, which the school students would be able to 'fill' with their story content. As you will see if you follow the link, one template was a comic-book style, the other a scrapbook style. These allowed the students to write their stories knowing in advance how the interactive screen would roughly look, and build their content appropriately.
For 14-year-olds at the school, the approach I took to explain what an interactive narrative might be was to say that it's like a journey from school to home, but on the way all kinds of things could happen which might delay you, send you off down side roads, you might pop in to see your gran, or be confronted by a rabid bunny (Portlanders don't like rabbits, and don't use the word 'rabbit' either).
I worked with the school to brief the students, and to help them prepare their stories, using print outs of the templates to aid their 'scripting'. Then, in a very busy production week, we did the filming, recorded sound, took photos, wrote words, and filled the templates with interactive content.
Have a look at what the 14-year-old (and our talented undergrads) achieved:
http://cemp.ac.uk/inp/
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