Melt Awardees
Interactive Narratives
by Ashley Barnes & Dan Ramsden (Dead Earnest)
Interactive Narratives was inspired by Forum Theatre, a live interactive theatre technique that Dead Earnest employ in much of their work. This technique enables an audience’s collective response to improve the outcome for the characters in the play, and in so doing allows the audience to rehearse strategies to improve their own lives. Their Melt R&D project explores ways of combining digital technology, drama and training to arrive an entirely new approach to Forum techniques, a little subversive in spirit, not pedagogical and with the potential to improve people’s lives.
Interactive Narratives seeks to exploit a range of digital platform dynamics and will use fictional stories to give people a space to think, reflect, experiment and share strategies for coping with key issues in their lives. The team have investigated multiple techniques for delivering non-linear narratives, incorporating user generated content into narratives and alienating the audience from passive reception into adopting an active role in the way a narrative proceeds and is understood. Melt helped Dead Earnest to establish a co-production with leading interactive media content producers, Magic Lantern. Interactive Narratives began as a specific ambition to put interactive theatre techniques online, it is now a series of storytelling and interaction tools and techniques which invite people to use an imaginative landscape to impact and improve the real world. These tools have applications across various markets and the team is in the process of defining the proposition to arrive at simple, marketable platform.
The prototype is due for completion in Summer 2007
Photograph by Shaun Bloodworth