Contents:

• Introduction
• 1 Background
• 1.1 What is interactive narrative
• 1.2 Why Interactive Narrative
• 2 Narrative
• 2.1 Introduction
• 2.2 Fabula
• 2.3 Different ways of creating interactive narrative
• 3 Filmlogs: A platform for Interactive Narrative
• 3.1 Introduction
• 3.2 Filmlog concept
• 3.3 Sharing using peer to peer
• 3.4 Interface
• 3.5 Navigation
• 4 Conclusion
• 4.1 Time and approach
• 4.2 Personal gain
• 4.3 Future development
• Appendix 1 Bibliography
• Online Publications
• Reports and Essays
• Audio visual media

Introduction

'Interactive narrative' covers many mediums, such as storytellers, computer games, books and films. The Internet has opened all sorts of possibilities for interactive narrative, but due to its nature, so far text based narratives have been developed the furthest.

Various people have tried to bring multimedia to the web, companies such as Macromedia with the application Flash, and the programming language SMIL designed for handling video and sound. But these are merely tools for authors to publish to the web, and have little opportunity for the audience to participate in the creation of a narrative.

Increasingly the web is moving from being a place to publish, to an area of creation. Wiki Wiki Web and Weblogs are but a few technologies currently out, giving both the publisher and the audience the power to create narrative together. The brief is to bring this power of creating narrative to the medium of film.

1 Background

1.1 What is interactive narrative

The first thing that needs clarifying is that Interactive narrative is not Virtual Reality. VR is only an attempt to submerse an audience into the story.

Interactive Narrative is narrative which gives the audience the ability to influence the course of events. i.e. Changing something which either alters the actual story, or influences how it is told. Another way to look at it to treat narrative like landscape, where the peaks are the things to overcome, and the path is your route through the story. Upon looking at narrative in this way, Interactive narrative would be a narrative that gives viewers the opportunity to take different paths, to explore one area in more detail, and to move through the narrative at their own pace.¹

1.2 Why Interactive Narrative

Interactive narrative has tried to be achieved by many people for as long as the ideas of recording or documenting. But since new technology has made the possibilities of non linear narrative, with the hyper-link and computer games, many have tried to apply this non-linearity to film.

Most attempts have focused on the individual interaction with the story, many more have focused merely on immersing the individual into the story. But interactive film should go beyond the individuals experience if it is going to be an every day thing. For interactive film to work, it needs to allow its viewers to respond how they like, not by offering a set of predefined choices, and it also needs to accommodate multiple participants.

2 Narrative

2.1 Introduction

It is not the place of this report to cover all the different definitions of narrative, there is already lots of material already available. However a few key things are needed to explain the process of this project

2.2 Fabula

Extract taken from the essay “Analysing the Performance of Interactive Narrative” by Andrew Hutchison (c) 2003 about the narratological model of Mike Bal.

"The Fabula is a system of elements and the interaction that occurs between them. At this level, they do not yet have specific details or characteristics. The elements of the Fabula are Events, Actors, Time, and Location. Six processes convert the Fabula into the next level, Story.

• Events are arranged into a sequence which can differ from the chronological sequence.
• Actors are provided with distinct traits and transformed into characters.
• Time in the story is allocated to the various elements of the Fabula, and develops frequency and rhythm.
• The Location where events occur are given distinct characteristics and become specific places.”

2.3 Different ways of creating interactive narrative

The “choices of events” method is often used in early attempts of interactive film, some books that tried to break the linearity of its medium, and some early computer games. It gives users a set of options which makes different events happen depending on the users choice. This has the several disadvantages:

• The flow of the story is interrupted as the story waits for the user to make a choice.
• Each different scenario has to be created, resulting in a the situation where authors produce three times as much content, but still only a third is actually viewed.
• Viewer sense that they are not really influencing the course of events, since they are just choosing from a predefined set of options.

The “audience react to events” method (e.g. weblogs), works by reversing the above method, where by instead of viewers choosing which major event should happen, they are given the event and then left to respond to it. The advantages of this are:

• Viewers actions are more predictable, as the nature of the given event will effect the way they are likely to respond.
• Viewer feel that they are not being restricted by the system capabilities, as rules can be defined by the given event.
• Less content has to be created, as the same events could be used every time, yet the viewer can still respond differently.

3 Filmlogs: A platform for Interactive Narrative

3.1 Introduction

The decision was made to adopt the Weblog idea because it deals with narrative in the ideal way. It allows the audience to respond to a Fabula, which would be set by the original author, and respond to a set of rules defined by the Fabula. However, because of the difference between text and film, a new interface needed to be designed.

Another key issue that needed to be resolved was the way that the media was distributed, due to its much larger file size.

3.2 Filmlog concept

The way a Filmlog works can be best explained by comparing it to a Weblog. Weblogs work by first starting with a topic of discussion, or a question. In a Filmlog, the same happens, except that it begins with a title and some pieces of film. In a Weblog people respond by adding posts, paragraphs of text written in response to the topic or question. Exactly the same happens in a Filmlog except that people respond by submitting pictures, film clips, and sound.

In Weblogs hyper-links in the film enable the readers to diverge into different areas, following the links to more content related to a particular post. In a Filmlog each image or clip can be followed and then elaborated on for future viewers to view later.

In a Filmlog there is no text², all content is either film, pictures or sound. And all the navigation happens within the film.

3.3 Sharing using peer to peer.

Due to the large file sizes of film, it is not realistic for users to upload content to one server. Instead it is proposed that a peer to peer framework is put in place to handle the media content.

Similar to how peer to peer file sharing works at the moment, individuals own media would be stored locally on their own machines. This media is then streamed over the Internet to all the other participants. This way storage of vast quantities of media is distributed among the participants, and bandwidth can be kept as low as possible.

This would have the effect of making certain content unavailable if the person hosting it is off-line. But in a large community, the effect of this would not be a negative one, rather, the resulting effect would become the very nature of Filmlogs.

3.4 Interface

The primary goal of the interface is to not intrude on the film. So objects like button and scrollbars were kept to a minimum. Most of the interaction was designed to happen within the film space, so only a few tasks required other objects.

It was imagined that the primary goal of the user would be to follow links. With this in mind it was decided that merely clicking on the film area would follow its link. To rewind or forward along the time line, the metaphor of the scrollbar was used. This was to avoid the film from being confused as being one clip, but rather a collection of clips arranged in a sequential order.

3.5 Navigation

To be able to add hyper-links to clips, it was decided that each clip would have to be a node, each with its own time line. These clips could then have content added to them, much like adding content to a wiki node. It was then up to viewers to navigate through these nodes, adding links to more nodes as they went.

After making a prototype, it was realized that not being able to return to the previous time line made navigating much more difficult, so a back function was added into the nodes primary clip. This then gave users the ability to navigate back and forward between nodes, as well as back and forward along each nodes time line.

4 Conclusion

4.1 Time and approach

Due to a tight schedule, most of this projects effort was put into the concept, rather than examining the final interface in detail. However this project is considered an ongoing project, where their will be many more developments of Filmlogs and other ideas tackling the problem of interactive narrative.

The beginning of this project tried to deal with interactive narrative for large audiences, mostly looking at a cinema audience. The idea to take the Weblog system and apply it to film, was originally a solution to tackle the large audience problem. However it was later decided to ignore the idea of a large audience in one physical space, and adopt a system that allowed a large audience in a virtual space (the Internet).

4.2 Personal gain

The decision to adopt an audience in a virtual space, gave a surprisingly interesting outcome and it is to be hoped that Filmlog will now influence any further research done in this area. The next stage of the project is to approach other developers to implement Filmlog into the real world, and hope that it continues to be developed in the open source community.

4.3 Future development

One area that could particularly be explored is the way for users to add content to nodes. Currently a collapsing window gives participants access to local files on their machine. It would be much better that the process of adding clips could be done in a less intrusive way.

Another area that could be explored further is the peer to peer networking, its feasibility, what other platforms it could work on, and ways it could prepare media for streaming across the Internet.

Appendix 1 Bibliography

Online Publications

http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:3b3XJPtRlekJ:www.kleene-star.net/sixprinciples/choice/essay.doc+interactive+narrative+essay&hl=en
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:lwuhvHLtaPgJ:www.kleene-star.net/sixprinciples/user/essay.doc+interactive+narrative+essay&hl=en
http://ic.media.mit.edu/Publications/Thesis/murtaughMS/HTML/InteractiveNarrative/InteractiveNarrative.html
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hughesbob/NasL.html
http://www.duke.edu/~tlove/simcity.htm
http://www.peterme.com/archives/00000197.html
http://multimedia.design.curtin.edu.au/juvenate/
http://www.immersence.com/
http://www.eve-online.com/
http://www.gne.net/?PHPSESSID=3af2ac01a208d4a5d7da5e46375026b6
http://www.fineartforum.org/Backissues/Vol_17/faf_v17_n08/reviews/hutchison.html
http://www.torrentocracy.com/
http://www.gne.net

Reports and Essays

“Analysing the Performance of Interactive Narrative” by Andrew Hutchison

“Community Values”, “Choice”, “Mental Shemata”, “Parallel Structure”, and “User” all by J. Hammer, all of which can be found at http://www.kleene-star.net

Audio visual media

“Dave's Day” from www.oldeenglish.org

“Juvenate” tap and stem Demonstration by Andrew Hutchison, downloadable from http://multimedia.design.curtin.edu.au/juvenate

“Armagetron” Version 0.2.5-1.fr. A multiplayer OpenGL “Tron” racing game clone. Maintained by Matthias Saou

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