Did you ever read someone’s Facebook status messages and learned about his personal stories through it? Did you ever read personal blogs and vlogs and felt that you are witnessing a real life story?
Last semester I lectured in a course in IDC about online storytelling, together with Noa Morag and Roni Abolafia. I wrote about it here, here and here. However I was asked several times to provide a wider overview on the topic. So here it is - an overview of immersive storytelling:
What is immersive storytelling?
Immersive storytelling is the use of social web and online video to tell a linear fictional story, through the social activities of the characters.
In cinematic storytelling, viewers experience stories by looking through a non existent wall (usually referred to as the 4th wall). The camera is accepted as given, a kind of an agreement between viewer and the actors that says: yep, we both know there is a camera here, but we accept it and actually ignore it. The emotional attachment to the characters on screen is achieved by suspension of disbelief - viewers leave their sense of reality at the entrance to the movie theater, and accept that robots, time machines[8.3/10 rating][8.3/10 rating] and radioactive naked people actually exist. In some cases, directors choose to break this rule - and change the viewers’ perspective on on-screen activities.
Ian Richardson as F. Urqhuhart in House of Cards broke the 4th wall in several episodes
But what about the stories that happen to people around us? People in real life? Did you ever read someone’s Facebook status messages and learned about his personal stories through it? Did you ever read personal blogs and vlogs and felt that you are witnessing a real life story?
Video is more efficient in creating emotional attachment than text - if done right. I saw this effect in a course in IDC Media School about online storytelling, which I (along with two amazingly talented lecturers, Noa Morag and Roni Abolafya) delivered last semester.
In the course, the students wrote dramatic stories, that were told via social media tools such as fictitious blogs, Facebook profiles, vlogs, and Twitter.
For example, one story portrayed a quest of an adopted son to find his biological mother. This emotional and strong story was told through his blog, vlog and Facebook profile.
Another story was more of a David Lynch style plot, about a guy who is being stalked, videotaped and harrassed by an unknown person, only to reveal that it was a girl he knows:
Though not intended as a main goal, the course provided an insight to effective emotion trigger in the online world.
Creating an online character is a complex task, especially when it is fictional. However, creating one is crucial for online storytelling, the art of telling stories over the internet. I am teaching at the Interdisciplinary Center a course about online storytelling and here are some of the challenges in this field:
Story Comes First
Though we are all hyped with Twitter and Facebook, and we want our character to use them as well we must start with the basics. The story is the most important part of your online creation, and as such it has to be reliable, and the characters, and their action, have to make sense to the viewer (Look at Cleaner’s last scene to see a case where it was NOT done properly).
As the year ends, here are the three most important developments that can change the online video market as we know it:
1. Content Discovery - as new blood and creative people are getting into the online video market, users are overwhelmed by the amount of unknown content out there. Technologies today do not provide a good solution for that. This issue prevents new content creators to get to wider viewer circles. One interesting direction that was not fully explored in 2007 is to mix online video and commercial content in a single engine, discovery site or recommendation mechanism. Some are starting to do that, but there is still a long way to go before an application would offer me both "The Wire" and "35". Do it on my TV screen as part of my setup box and I am in love.
2. Cross Platform Content Delivery - a long definition for a simple request - help people watch their online video on their TV screen. Most online creators are still providing video only productions, where users experience is the same on TV and their computer screen. The ones who would enable my mother to simply watch "Ask a Ninja" on her living room TV screen, not only become a rich men - but also change the online video market as we know it. If you think this is last year news - please bear in mind that Apple TV is a flop, Microsoft Media Center is still used mainly by tech savvies , and online video is NOT main stream entertainment.
3. Top Talents Getting involved in Online Entertainment - and experimenting with new kinds of storytelling: yes, content is king, but only amazing content will gain traction in the mess of UGC, mid tail and pirated commercial grade videos. Though I’d love to see a direct to Internet video production by Simon David, I’d be thrilled to see an online ARG by Rodriguez, or a new kind of high end drama that gives the viewer added value by seeing it online.
This is the first in a series of posts where we will try to discover and define the art of online storytelling. The aim of these posts is to create a conversation, and as such, they will be posted in Facebook and relevant mailing lists. All posts will be tagged with “online storytelling” - I’d appreciate if you’d tag response posts the same so we could trace the conversation. Also, if you read this post not on my blog, I’d appreciate if you will post comments here too - so everyone can join the discussion - even if they are not on Facebook….
In a past post, I’ve detailed my view that Internet TV is only one side of video on the Internet, and as such, provide limited storytelling tools.
I was asked by a local College to create a course detailing the theoretical background and practical applications of this medium. We’ve created a multidisciplinary team, including a TV director and media innovators, to work together and define the medium.
In our work, we stumbled across many issues. It seems that the narrative tools of the Internet are complex, and yet to defined.
Here is an example - do Internet storytelling tools act as a film camera, or they are a manifestation of a fictional world? Though seems like a trivial question - it is definitely not an easy question to answer. The reason is that each answer have wide implications. If we treat the Internet as a camera, we assume that viewers and characters are accepting the convention of the existence of the camera-The 4th wall concept is accepted, and viewers and characters alike are not “aware” that the camera exist. In this case - one does not need to justify the existence of the camera - we agree that it is there, and we agree to ignore it. Therefore one can tell a story in the Internet with a clear entry point - a website that starts the story, and the storyteller can upload scripted and pre-recorded videos in its most simplistic way to advance the plot. However if the Internet is the manifestation of the fictional world - the writer needs to justify every piece of media that the characters upload to the Internet - meaning, every online activity has to be in the boundaries of logic of the character.
Sounds trivial - but it is far from that. If a character needs justification to every online activity, the narrative is limited to very specific story types - ones that there is a character that writes a diary or online journal. While it provides a great narrative tool for drama, it complicates other genres such as crime or espionage story. How can you tell a story about a secret agent if you need to justify the fact that he has a blog or Facebook profile?
Furthermore it narrows the type to characters you can create - they have to be active online, otherwise they are not seen.
This point made me think about the final scene of Godfather 2 - Michael Corleone, in one of his darkest hours, remembered the past of his warm family. In a flashback scene, we see Vito’s Corleone birthday, where Michael tells his brother that he is going to the army. Everyone are waiting for the guest of honor, and then we hear a door open - it is clear that Vito has arrived. This emotional scene works great, and shows the difference in the life of the Corleone family through the years - for the worse. Merlon Brando refused to participate in this scene, and is not shown at all. It doesn’t change its impact, and sometimes I think that it increases its effectiveness. So, can we use the same tool in online storytelling? Can we use online characters to reflect on offline characters - and how does it affect our narrative possibilities?
My main concern with deciding that the Internet is just like a camera, and that viewers and characters alike are willingly buying in to the illusion it creates is the following:
1. The art of online storytelling is in its infancy. “Letting” creators “get away” with the 4th wall concept might be a slippery slope toward just posting video on the Internet and calling it online storytelling.
2. Online users do not get the same overall experience that films provide. When going to the theater, the dark room, sound system, and overall experience allows you to dive easily in to the fictional world presented on the silver screen. Online experience is different - viewers are less focused, which increases the pressure to create a reliable world that is adjusted to the medium, and not take for granted that users have their full attention to the creation they see.
In the mean time - take a look on this Nine Inch Nails / Godfather mashup…
