tim wright: digital writer

Sorry I missed your birthday Shakespeare

I really liked the idea of contributing to http://birthday2012.bloggingshakespeare.com/, but failed to get my act together last week. So here’s a belated post.

Shakespeare has been looming quite large for me in recent weeks. I’ve been re-reading 'The Tempest' as homework for an AHRC research project I’ve been contributing to (http://digitalcopsandrobbers.wordpress.com/). I was invited to the energy-fuelled version of Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Lyric Hammersmith. *And* I chanced upon a Globe Theatre production of Othello on Sky Arts with a mesmerising performance by Tim McInnerny as Iago.

This isn’t that unusual actually. Every few weeks or months, something about Shakespeare tends to intrude into my life (and yes, I know how wanky that sounds). In the last few years he’s cropped up in a Twitterplay I helped write, a really good film I saw, a really good book I read, a place I visited...

This is rather the point about Shakespeare. If you’re someone who’s trying to make a living from any kind of writing and/or performing, he looms large. Sometimes he looms in a threatening way – (thinks: I will simply never be as good as him at what I do).  On good days, perhaps, it feels more like a steadyand reliable pulse that beats on in the background of a writer’s life. He’s always there. There’s always another one of his works that is relevant to what’s happening to you right now.

And yet the most striking thing about Shakespeare for me is how bloody surprising he is whenever you do go back to him. He’s just so damn fresh and experimental; he’s so quick to set up really interesting situations and dilemmas for people who have character traits and personalities that you instantly recognise; so good at using language to create a mood, set a scene or match the action.

And then he’s prepared to take scenes and plotlines and whole plays off into crazy places that somehow seem acceptable and *real*, and that offer the potential for all kinds of endings, happy or sad. Quite often I finish reading or watching a play and think: 'I wonder what could have happened to that character?' - even though I *know* what happened to that character because Shakespeare told me.

I guess that’s why I keep returning, and why I keep getting surprised. And in that way he sets the bar so very high. It spurs me on. Happy (Belated) Birthday.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover and the poet

Are of imagination all compact:

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,

That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:

The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination,

That if it would but apprehend some joy,

It comprehends some bringer of that joy;

Or in the night, imagining some fear,

How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

Playing MoonGolf with Jon Spooner: Hole #4 (St Albans) & Hole#5 (Capetown)

I had a lovely time last week speccing out and 'playing' MoonGolfHole #4 in St Albans with Jon Spooner: 

Jon is one of life's natural moongolfers as this video proves:

It turns out that the route we took maps onto the moon quite well, so that's one more hole sorted for when we finally get out on the lunar course:

Jon, by the way, is probably nearer the dream of getting into space than I am, damn him. And thanks to the organisation he belongs to - UNSA - it looks like he's going be taking a lot more people with him than I will.

At the moment, Jon is attending the International Astronautical Congress in CapeTown (yes, that's how serious he is) and it turns out he's keen to spec out MoonGolfHole #5 while he's there! Obviously, I have given him my full support, and even sorted him out with a letter of recommendation, just in case anyone out there doesn't quite take him seriously.

Download To Jon Spooner

Below is the proposed layout of the hole which Jon is hoping to play tomorrow (Thurs 6th Oct) at 2pm local time. If you're at the conference, do try and make it. And remember - DON'T LEAVE SPACE TO THE PROFESSIONALS.

"Preparing for life and leisure on the moon whilst being stuck here on earth is a tricky and sometimes odd business. But the MoonGolf mission is all about playing & preparing for something seemingly silly & impossible.

I sense you are someone who understands the importance of silliness and impossible dreams. All great space travellers (and invaders) understand this too, I think!

For these reasons, I am very happy to endorse the creation of MoonGolfHole #5 (CapeTown). I have studied the map of the terrain very closely and have drawn out my recommendations for a teeing-off point, a ‘green’ and a ‘hole’. Quite how many strokes it will take you to complete this hole is for you and your fellow players to discover.

Remember, it is very important that you recruit as many fellow players as you can, and that you use your time together to walk the course, sharing with each other as you go your dreams and ambitions, your thoughts about how we all might play our way into the future.

Please do record as much of your conversations as possible, map the hole and send me any ‘findings’ that come out of your game in terms of how to keep the amateur spirit of play alive: the amateur spirit that will eventually fire me (and maybe you) to the moon!"

You Shall Go To The Ball: Getting Them in Ones & Twos

I spent some time over the last couple of months helping to develop, script and deploy http://youshallgototheball.com, a storytelling game for people planning to watch the Royal Opera House’s production of Cinderella for free on BBC Big Screens around the UK on July 13th 2011.

This, I have to tell you, is not a massive audience to play to. There were probably only about 10,000(ish) people turning up on the night across 12 screens, most of them in Trafalgar Square  - and a very small percentage of those are interested in both opera, outdoor events *and* social media.

The goal then was not to grab a massive number of ‘hits’ or ‘likes’, but rather to build a storyworld which delivered  to active users simple ways of enhancing their enjoyment of their night out at the Big Screen Ball (taking pics, sharing comments, dressing up, roleplaying, winning comfy cushions).

The more we could then reflect back to the wider (more passive) audience signs of this core group having fun, the better. And then *everyone* could enjoy the animations on the Big Screen that were built up using some of the assets generated by the online audience.

In the end, what will stick with me most of all about this project is the smiley faces of these people holding up their ‘crown’ badges or their cushions, won by joining in a country-wide #crownhunt:

 

A lot of talented people working together just to produce one or two smiley faces might not seem like a great economic or artistic model to you. But for me, this is becoming a rather compelling model for this kind of work – an audience & a production team striving to conjure up a magic moment for just one person THAT ISN’T YOU.

I first cottoned on to this idea with the Kidmapped project, which was a lot of walking, filming, editing, blogging & audience participation that really culminated in one very poor quality image of two people – previously strangers – looking very chuffed with themselves after an unexpected sailing trip.

I’m not sure this measurement of success is going to persuade the ROH to have another go at this kind of work. You Shall Go To The Ball, though, was a very interesting experiment in how to extend a ROH production online in various playful, social ways. And it spurs me on to think of other projects that might grab audiences in ones & twos, rather than hundreds & thousands.

Oh - and, as usual, it was great  to work with a really talented bunch of people drawn from different disciplines: Rachel Coldicutt on development & scripts; JoyceDiDonato on voice-over; and the *mega*-talented animation team of Carol Soutar and Si Clark who responded so creatively & energetically to the user generated content  elicited from the audience (cf #tidying, #partyshoes etc).

Mount Kristos: Story versus Play

Having been invited to write an essay about an old, old project called Mount Kristos, I caught myself writing about story and play. Funny how writing stuff down can actually commit you to an opinion you didn't even know you had (or is that just the first step down the slippery slope towards becoming Toby Young/Tim Dowling/Jan Moir* et al?!):

"Even to this day, it doesn’t feel like we’ve solved the basic tension between story and play. For the most part, people are still treating online ‘theatrical’ events and interactive story projects as an excuse to party on noisily, ignoring all the wonderful trinkety things ‘creatives’ sweat blood to make for the audience’s entertainment.

Many times whilst rolling out MK, I definitely felt like an actor on stage desperately trying to be heard above the hubbub of a quite rowdy drinks party going on in the auditorium.

True, there’s a new generation of ‘digital play’ studios emerging that are clever at developing light-weight sets of tools, kits and/or basic rules rather than multimedia-rich ‘content’ – with the aim perhaps of allowing players to define their own play & story worlds, handing over control of where and when both story and game starts and ends – and defining who you get to play with and even what kind of story gets told.

It’s unclear to me as yet, though, that this DIY kit approach to interactive storytelling and play actually ends up supporting (or generating?) stories that have any serious impact or interest beyond a short period of intense play between a small group of people.

We all know the joy of banter around a card table (real or virtual) and have fond memories of goofy playground games, dressing up parties, unusual outings with friends and so on. But is this really the breeding ground for new *meaningful* forms of digital entertainment with broad appeal and longer term socio-cultural significance? For me, the jury’s still out on that one.

*Yes I did deliberately put Tim Dowling in that group. Sorry.

Such Tweet Sorrow: I was Jago_Klepto

During April & May this year I spent a lot of my time working on Such Tweet Sorrow – ‘a Twitterplay’ based (loosely) on Romeo & Juliet, produced by Mudlark and the Royal Shakespeare Company. It’s fair to say that it’s a project that ‘divided opinion’. 

A number of arts critics dismissed it as an irritating and faddish attempt to sell Shakespeare to the yoof under false pretences, using ghastly illiterate txtspeak instead of ‘proper’ poetry. e.g. this from the Guardian.

People with perhaps a deeper understanding of online drama & storytelling faulted the production for being unsophisticated and stereotypical in its portrayal of teen culture – and I guess felt they’d have done a better job of designing something meaningful and moving if they’d been given the chance. e.g. Hannah Nicklin's thoughtful but essentially negative post.

On the other hand, there’s little doubt that STS did find a sizable audience that loved what we were doing, and over the 4.5 weeks there were several moments where I think we did achieve some level of grip and intensity that justified the whole experiment.

For example, the 'masked ball' where Romeo and Juliet met was very much enhanced by the sharing of a party playlist, the uploading of dozens of mask pics from the audience and a steady stream of very witty backchat using the #suchtweet hashtag. 

The #savemercutio campaign (and the mercutio groupie scene in general) was another highlight. It’s interesting to note that online audience members will still try to influence events in a story even though they already know how the story goes and, in this case, know that the death of a character is inevitable. 

Perhaps familiarity with the story is exactly what promotes the playfulness and participation? Everything is running on rails enough for people to feel safe about improvising and adding feedback without ultimately disrupting the fabric and flow of the production? 

As a writer (working alongside the very talented Bethan Marlow btw), the most enjoyable task for me was to develop an ancillary character Jago who could provide a perspective on the story from a world outside and beyond the Twitter feeds of the six main characters. It felt like a useful way to be able to summarise what was happening from day to day without stepping out of the storyworld completely. It was my first time writing anything in Tumblr and I enjoyed it a lot. 

I hadn’t quite banked on the character of Jago becoming a mystery in itself with audience members wanting to know whether he was meant to be Iago from Othello or Nick Carraway from the Great Gatsby or even Shakespeare himself (wtf?). I guess in some way he was all these things and none – just another teenage klepto with suppressed ambitions to be some kind of actor or writer and a lot of resentment and self-doubt fuelling his envy of the seemingly’ beautiful’ people he has to live with in the town. 

As an experiment then, STS has left a lot of food for thought. I certainly think it was worth doing rather than not – if for nothing more than to make trouble and throw into relief what I see as the growing disconnection in the arts between the professional cultural cogniscenti and the hobbyist online audience. 

I too have my reservations about the quality and value of this kind of work. But without the kind of active experimentation that STS embodies it’s difficult to know how we’re going to work out what ‘quality’ means or what values we’re meant to be sharing when it comes to online drama.

p.s. respec' to thejives for this interesting piece of ST data analysis

p.p.s. i was Mrs (*not* Ms) Capulet aswell

Whither SWYWTHery

Having bigged up the first SWYWTH play on Radio 4 in a previous post, I made the error of not encouraging people to listen to the second play 'The Endgame' and now I'm afraid it's lost in the mists of time. 

This feels like a shame since it was the second play where people's input, their own personal secret thoughts, really started to have a strong influence on how the drama could play out. I've decided to put the script up here so people can read it at their leisure even if they can't hear it.

Download Swywth endgame 9.1

There did seem to be a fun and effective journey for the listener here from hearing the first play, going to the swywth submission site, gambling on getting their secret thoughts 'voiced', hearing other people's stuff - and then waiting to see what impact these swywths might have on both the characters and the storyworld in a second play. 

Sadly, I don't think we managed that flow right and couldn't keep people's interest and attention long enough to get them to the second play.

I've moaned lightly on the BBC Get Writing blog about whether all the effort everyone made was really worth it in the end:

"It's questionable, however, whether the final output (2 x 45 minute radio plays and a contribution site that now lies dormant) ever could have delivered the kind of extra impact in terms of audience numbers, critical reception and/or explicit creative or technological innovations that would have justified the extra effort we all put in.<If I was doing this again I'd want to deliver a project with a much longer "tail" that allowed the audience to contribute secret thoughts online over a much longer period, with a much quicker and responsive turnaround from the moment of contribution to the publication of, say, a series of collectable "swywth" podcasts.I'd want to find other ways too of using audience swywths elsewhere in the Radio 4 schedule - and encourage other writers to dip into the well of swywths in order to inspire other works: poems, plays, collaborative prose pieces.All in all I'd want us to get better value out of the creative investment over a longer period of time. (And naturally I'd also have liked to have written better plays that didn't confuse the audience quite as much as they obviously did.)" 

In hindsight this summary feels a bit too sour and negative. The second play is genuinely funny I think - and there are over 40 contributions in there from listeners that sit well within the story. 

My memories of recording the two plays and working with the Radio 4 production team on all the different elements of this project are good ones. So in the end, the love affair with radio continues. And I cross my fingers I get the chance in the future to develop and deliver something really effective. 

SWYWTH: two BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Plays - with your secret thoughts included.

I'm delighted to say that the first of two 'Say What You Want To Hear' (aka 'swywth') plays I've written for Radio 4 – 'The Startup' – goes on air on Thursday 11th February 2010, starring Stephen Tompkinson, Ewan Bailey and Keely Beresford.

I'm hoping that you the audience are going to help with the storymaking process by sending in a certain type of short message that I'm calling a 'swywth' (please don't ask me how to pronounce that).

See http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/swywth/ for for details

What is a ‘swywth’? Well, it’s a word I’ve invented to describe a secret thought – specifically the kind of secret thought that knocks around your head regularly but that never normally gets said out loud.

For some, a swywth is the pep talk you give yourself in the morning when you look in the mirror. For others, it’s the judgement you silently pass on your colleagues as you sit through yet another boring meeting . Or perhaps it’s a regret, a cherished memory, an ambition – or some nonsense from childhood that haunts you as you stare out of the bus window.

Whatever it is, it’s actually pretty rare for a swywth to get written down, let alone spoken out loud.

But now thanks to a special arrangement with BBC Radio 4, I’ve been lucky enough to have helped set up a system whereby people can send in their swywths to a website and then get them read out and recorded by Radio 4 announcers, presenters and actors. A small but significant selection of these audible swywths  has already been published back to the web as sound files for us all to listen to. Here’s a couple that are already online:

I’m hoping that as the swywth bank grows, we can get more and more eminent and surprising speakers to read out your swywths. Personally, I’m hoping, for example, to get Harrison Ford to read out mine. A crazy dream I know - but no less crazy than some of your swywths I imagine.

THE RADIO PLAYS: ADD YOUR SWYWTHS TO THE MIX

And in the meantime, I’ve been inspired by the Say What You Want To Hear system (S.W.Y.W.T.H. geddit?) to write two Afternoon Plays for Radio 4 that tell a story about how swywthery came to be invented and how swywths can affect different people in very different ways.

As part of the story, I’m going to try and get as many people’s swywths as I can into each play. Indeed some of the swywths might even have their own special effect on the characters and colour events - especially in Play Two.

So if you fancy your secret thoughts appearing in a radio play, send in your swywths soon. Who knows where it will take us?

(You can also join in the 'swywth'-making process on Twitter, on Facebook, on Youtube, on Flickr.)

Narrative/Non-Narrative/Anti-Narrative Conference

This looks interesting:

http://www.encounters-festival.org.uk/Narrative-Conference.html

23rd - 24th November 2008, Watershed
Harbourside, Bristol, UK

From Cathy Come Home to Kate Modern
Narrative in a time of change

Extending the Encounters film festival, The Narrative/Anti-Narrative/Non-Narrative Conference brings experiences from the leading edge of communication, delivered by international experts, including :

Director Ken Loach, whose power with narrative changed the British view of homelessness, and Professor Erik Knudsen, defining how to deliver a cinematic experience on a mobile

Frank Ash, the BBC’s Creative Consultant, creates a new role for the audience as the starting point for ideas. Multiplatform Executive Julian Phillips creates projects where the public are co-creators with the BBC.

Hugh Hancock invented the term “machinima” – the movie that uses a game engine. Grethe Mitchell charts this collision of gaming and film, and the new experiences it creates. Brita Pollmuller creates a new film language with teenagers in Second Life.

Walking through the narrative, artist Duncan Speakman and drama producer Faith Collingwood explore locative media.

Real – virtual - interactive - Hazel Grian writes for Kate Modern, and creates new dramatic forms in Augmented Reality

See some new approaches to feature film stories in FAQs about Time Travel with writer Jamie Mathieson and Better Things with producer Samm Haillay.

Kim's Game

I've been helping out with a radio drama on the BBC World Service called Kim's Game, which kicked off yesterday. I've developed the blog element where people can comment on the main character's dilemma - she's turned up in London having lost her memory and needs to piece together her past and find out who she is.

Over the next few weeks, there'll be short broadcasts on Outlook and a series of posts from the production team and writer Jonathan Myerson. The audience feedback will be used to help Jonathan develop Kim's story into a full 60-minute radio drama in February.

Already there are some great contributions from the audience. It proves - if proof were needed - that there is an audience out there for participative fiction. And also gives the lie to a prevailing view in some quarters of the broadcast industry that quality (whatever dat mean) inevitably suffers if you let the general public become part of the process.

Smalltown Crier

I went to the NT Studios last Friday and took part in a development session for a new play by the people who created 'Self Assembly'. The idea is to produce drama where there are no actors present and no stage. Instead the audience become the characters and make their entertainment in a suitably dressed space. Actions and interactions are prompted by a series of announcements from a PA system, letters sent into the space and various props.

In the case of 'Smalltown Crier', we (about dozen of us) all got job titles and eye-masks and then entered a space with an old-fashioned school room in the middle, plus chairs, desks and a couple of beds set around the edge of the room. We all had our assigned seat with a hat to suit our job title (I was a medical consultant) and a letter telling us a few things we ought to know about who we liked, who we hated and what guilty secrets we may be harbouring.

Over the next 90 mins we settled into very comfortable rhythm of listening to narrative V/Os at night (we were all seated with our blindfolds for these), 'waking up' each morning to new letters/instructions/gossip and then spending the 'days' acting out our parts, writing secret letters to other for delivery the next morning and trying to uncover the mysteries of the town in which we lived.

Central to the mystery was the disappearance of a large supply of morphine from the town hospital. There was also the usual town shenanigans of embezzlement, adultery and addiction  - plenty of sub-plots to muddy the waters and keep each character gossiping in order to work out what the hell was going on.

In the midst of all this, letters started appearing from the mysterious 'Raven', and it became the resolving issue of the play to guess who The Raven was.

If this all sounds like some kind of country house murder mystery weekend compressed into an hour and a half, well that's because it was. But some elements of the 'game' did achieve something a bit more edifying. There were moments when the night-time monologues really did introduce a note of creepiness and jeapordy that made you feel you really had to 'perform' the next morning. The relationships between particularly characters became surprisingly intense. My required antipathy towards the people who were playing the Doctor and the Nurse took on an edge that surprised us all, I think (or maybe my purchasing of a shotgun from the Fireman about halfway in was what added the zest...)

I had only a couple of issues with the whole experience. One - it became quite natural to fall into interaction with the same three or four people who you seemed to be related to narratively. This meant that large chunks of the main story just passed you by. I managed to speak hardly at all to some of the key characters, notably the Head Teacher and the Samaritan, whilst frittering away a lot of time hounding the poor Nurse. Second - the emotive issues of abortion and drug addiction within the community were deemed to be secondary in the structure of the play to the key 'puzzle' issue of finding out who was 'The Raven'. I found it disappointing that we ended up 'voting' rather simplistically about the Raven issue but were expected not to worry too much that the Doctor was pushing drugs and offering illegal abortions - or indeed that the town psychiatrist had a morphine habit that led to one hospital patient committing suicide over the lack of pain relief.

Still, these are quibbles and it was a development workshop. It's great to know that someone is out there trying to walk the tightrope between drama and play. And this kind of work has a lot to tell digital writers about audience participation - or dealing with the 'audience as developers' (a topic for discussion at b.tween, I see).