Week Five - Interactive and Non Linear Storytelling

 In today's seminar I learnt about interactive and non linear storytelling. Cinema is traditionally linier as this is a convention that audiences often expect to see, however there are many popular films which break this cycle. Kill Bill, Mr Robot and Pulp Fiction are all examples of non linear stories as much of the plot you never see or is expressed to you in forms of flashbacks or is never explained.

The non-linear storytelling style was made popular through game books, which require the audience to create their own stories through personal choices. This was a revolutionary idea as it was unconventional to what was traditionally popular and with this many more forms of nonlinear storytelling have become popular, such as the films listed or other books which totally rely on the audience to make sense of them rather than the author laying it out for them. For example ‘The Jigsaw’ is a 1962 book that is reliant on the reader to put it in the ‘correct’ order, as it simply loses pages in a book sleeve, shuffled in a random order.

For the personal task today we had to create our own non linear storylines on twine, a simple storyboarding platform. For my own story I chose to create a how to get away with murder idea, where you, the main character, finds yourself at the scene of the crime, murder weapon in hand. From there there are multiple choices on how you handle the situation which lead to a variety of endings with some ending with you getting caught or others getting away with it. These decisions range from throwing the weapon into a nearby river to complimenting an old lady which seriously does hold a great significance to your chance at freedom. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this task as having to come up with the multiple endings based on selected story paths was challenging but allowed me to explore my creativity.

During the seminar we talked about real world media examples of these non linier stories and Netflix’s ‘Bandersnatch’ was repeatedly brought up. Although it was very popular a couple years ago I had actually never watched it so later that afternoon I did. At first I expected to get quickly bored of the premise as finding yourself stuck in a dead end was quite easy but once I had a glimpse at how such a small decision, such as choosing what cereal the main character should eat, has such a major effect on what ending you get I then wanted to explore them all. I probably spent around two hours trying to find all these hidden endings and found the storyline that the main character was aware he wasn’t in control fascinating. You get the option to talk to him directly and try to explain what Netflix is, which leads to a scene where he talks to his dad repeatedly saying “I’m not in control, someone is controlling me”. This weird fourth wall break is such an interesting concept for a film, especially having to try to explain to a fictional character that they are just that, not real.