Session 4: Non-Linear Storytelling
The objective for today’s session was looking into interactive
and non-linear narratives. These were a few films following the non-linear
structure:
The session
taught me how non-linear is found in many forms ranging from books to films but
by nature cinema will always be linear. Leading into our first task we looked
into some works that follow a non-linear narrative structure. I decided to
choose ‘Hollow’ as my analysis but first I looked into a previous student’s
work to see how they tackled a non-linear story of their own.
My understanding of non-linear storytelling didn’t
come to be naturally, but I started to gain an idea at the mention of Pulp
Fiction. Having studied it at A Level, I was aware the storyline was not linear
but moved in different directions continuously until you reached the end back
inside the diner where it all began. This is a common trait with Quentin Tarintino’s
films which is how I started to understand this idea of non-linear
storytelling. I knew by now it meant films that didn’t follow a chronological
order or would take different directions than you would expect it to. I kept
this in mind when I headed into the first task. I started with a student’s
piece of work to further my understanding of this session.
Task 1:
Following
off from this task we looked into ‘designing interacting non-linear narratives’.
As Carolyn Miller states in her book ‘Digital Storytelling: A creator’s guide
to interactive entertainment’ (p.55 - 56) interactivity is a conversation
between the user and the content. When people get to participate in interactive
entertainment they have choice and control; “they get to chose what to see and
do within an interactive work, and the decisions they make have an impact upon
the story” (p.55 – 56). It was interesting to learn the three different structures
that can create an interactive story – traditional dramatic structures, interactive
story structures and branching tree structure. With the traditional structure
you have this ‘beats’ which you follow within the narrative leading you to each
important part of the story. Interactive story structure is different by having
‘nodes’; this is commonly used in games as it gives gamers the ability to work
with one another to complete the tasks with different actions. However the
structure which intrigued me the most was the branching structure. It’s a
useful structure to use as you can create different choices for the audience to
pick from but if there is no sudden ending to one of these choices then the
branches will escalate and get out of control; this is the only problem with
this structure.
Task 2:
When creating our own non-linear narrative in twine,
I decided to develop the story of Disney’s adaptation of the Snow Queen ‘Frozen’.
I saw a chance with this movie to use the branching structure to create
different narrative solutions with Elsa’s powers. Taking a different approach
to the task I wrote the story in simpler text keeping the same narrative Disney
created but at certain ‘beats’ I gave the audience two choices to pick from for
them to decide what should happen and let them play with the narrative. The
more I created the map; I wanted to create links between each of the separate
story-lines to show they can all end up back at one ending if they wanted to. A
certain moments I knew some of the songs within the film would be perfect to
explain the narrative to the audience as well so I decided to improve my skills
and learning with the twine program and embedded YouTube clips to explain the
story. At the ending, I wanted to embed some images however I encountered some
problems so next time when I use this program I’d like to see if I can get it
working.
Out of all the tasks I have completed so far, this one
has been the most interesting to me. I felt I had so much freedom to create
what I wanted and put all my ideas on page rather than settling with just one
idea. Furthermore, from the other creative tasks I have taken part in, when
using twine I felt I could bring all these tasks together in some way and this is
what I enjoyed most about the task. Overall, today I’ve learned how to
manipulate narratives for the audience to interact and change the story if they’d
like to with different approaches to do so.
Link to interactive story: Google Drive.
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