We had a midpoint review with Culture mile, with Jamie and Elle. Presenting our idea in front of them at the Barbican, we decided not to stray away from the presentation style we had gained over the last semester. We wrote a story specific to the Barbican, about a villager named Roger Wallace who lived in Smithfield in the year 1645.
Alexandra told the story and they were really engrossed in it. We continued ahead by talking about transmedia story telling and explained our concept to them.
Feedback from Culture Mile
Having a bunch of different mediums of telling a story, it did not effectively gel together. We had to figure out a way to make the idea cohesive. Jamie also mentioned that we would have to make the idea age-appropriate, something which we were facing difficulty with owing to the gory history of Smithfield.
Feedback from the tutors
After the feedback, we spoke to Alistair. His feedback was that we should think about how we would inculcate the concept of time into the stories of history. We also spoke about how we could scale this concept into a space and visualize how it would be. He also guided us in the hierarchy of presentation.
The next day, John and Mor gave us a few guidelines to go ahead and dig deeper. John told us to watch Cloud atlas which informed out next steps.
Next steps- Concepts
We decided to write four stories which transcend time and space through Smithfield, and then ideate different media to tell the stories. Alexandra and I chose to write the stories. We first mapped out the timeline of Smithfield and wrote down important historic events which we wanted to include in the stories. We then fabricated a few details to connect the stories to each other.
Inspiration
After watching cloud atlas, we had an idea of the following four characters and how to follow them through space and time.These characters overlap each other at different time and spaces and impact each other. We wrote narratives of four main characters —
1.A young maiden - Grace
2.A pig - Babe
3.A butcher -Jack
4.The peace memorial statue
We first thought of writing the narrative for the peace memorial in a speculative future, but John suggested that we would need a lot of reading and research for making it into a possible world. So, instead we chose to take three narratives.
These are the stories of the three characters-
Design Fiction
As we were writing the three narratives, I read Julian Bleecker's 'Design Fiction'. This gave me an insight into writing a narrative intertwining fact and fiction. It is interesting to see how fact and fiction can be swapped. Design fiction is usually a speculation on how the future might look like, but in this project I have used it to show people how the history might have been like.
Richard McGuire's 'Here' reads deeply into going back into history without leaving the corners of the room. It is a 36 panel comic which has floating frames of history, an interesting look into the overlap between fact and fiction.
References
Bleecker, J., 2009. Design Fiction: A short essay on design, science, fact and fiction.Near future laboratory,29.
Cloud Atlas, 2012, Motion picture, Cloud Atlas Production, X-Filme Creative Pool, Anarchos Productions, Germany, USA.
Cook, R., 2014. Here by Richard McGuire: Review—An Exquisitely Drawn Ecological Warning.The Guardian.
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