tim wright: digital writer

Making Stories Out Of Squiggles

At some point during his talk at Field Studies, Tim Ingold drew a squiggle on a whiteboard:

It looked a bit like this: 

He was talking about perception – in particular how we see and hear the world around us – and with this squiggle he was trying to show (I think) how anthropologists, in particular, have had a problem over the years about how to record accurately the experience of living within a community and comprehending its culture. (Someone else who attended this talk will almost certainly be able to report this better than I can.)

Tim repeatedly wanted to make the point that life, as it is lived, keeps going forward in a constant flow, so that any attempt to ‘record’ our experience of life in some ways always takes us out of that flow and forces us to look (and hear) backwards, and then ‘replay’ an experience.

So Tim’s squiggle was an attempt to show how an anthropologist might live in the flow of other people’s lives for a while, but would then loop back over that experience to where the journey had begun and would then replay it to the point where the journey stopped. Tim seemed to be claiming from this that all endings are imposed and somehow a falsification of actual experience. Is this right?

I got slightly obsessed with this squiggle - as you can already tell – and perhaps stopped paying close attention to Tim’s complicated but compelling arguments about how sound has been treated differently to sight over the centuries by intellectuals and cultural historians (most basically by talking about ‘sight & sound’ rather than ‘light & sound’ or ‘sight & hearing’.)

What interested me was how this squiggle might also be used to think about how writers take experiences and make stories out of them - imposing beginnings, middles and ends on chunks of life that are in reality just one continuous (meaningless? storyless?) flow.

I am starting to imagine a story structure that matches the squiggle.

(1) We start at the end, a scene or an event that somehow needs ‘explaining’.  

(2) We move forward in real time for a short while but with a slightly heightened perspective of the storyworld.

(3) Now we start heading back, already reviewing the end point of the story, but with some kind of overview rather than being ‘in the room’.

(4) I start to pick out significant moments from the past, significant in how they might relate to the end, without actually clearly stating or even understanding their significance. We stay ‘above’ the action.

(5)  We hit a key scene in the past where the experience of the story is actually lived again by the writer, a point where the storyteller is part of the story, too involved in the scene to be ‘dispassionate’.

(6) The writer is now working ‘below’ the storyline’, looking for undercurrents, themes, psychologies that can explain what’s been going on, and then reaches a third key point in the story, the point where the story *really* began, the trigger point for everything that came after.

(7) And now we start to replay events from this trigger point, events already described to us but which  start to have a pattern and a meaning we hadn’t perceived before. Til then the story had just been a set of selected points in time we scrolled back through without seeing any pattern. Now we can consider a key point both from above and from within.

(8) Perhaps now an event we’d logged before whilst going back into the past has a new hue, a new meaning now that we approach it from the other direction and with new knowledge of events that preceded it.

(9) And as we zoom down to an ending, the point where in fact the writer started, we come to that point with a new understanding, with a pattern defined, with the sense of an ending. What started as a bare fact, an isolated incident has now been imbued with significance, emotion, symbolism, meaning.

Now I have no idea whether this makes any sense at all. It is though (for me) an interesting (but not the only) way to think about story. (The story it makes me think of most of all btw is The Good Soldier). I’m already wondering what happens if I change the axes so that squiggle works symmetrically (well, almost).

Does that change things? Who knows? But I am indebted anyway to Tim Ingold (and Field Studies) for at least getting me thinking again about something that is pretty fundamental to a storyteller’s art.

Field Studies: Learning To Listen

I spent most of last week attending the very excellent Field Studies summer school.

Ostensibly a course in sound appreciation & design for architects, the course actually attracted an excitingly diverse range of people: artists, musicians, journalists, engineers, anthropologists, producers, students, post-grads...  (and architects).

My main motivation for going back to school was the realisation that environmental noise, as well as ‘ambient’ and 'found' sounds,  have inevitably become a significant part of my recent outdoor projects.

The wind, for example, was my prime enemy during my walks in Scotland and Schleswig Holstein, screwing up many a Flipcam clip or Audioboo. The sounds of nature and of the street, though, have also become my friends during Blakewalks and whilst developing TheHaunter. I’ve felt for a while now that instead of trying either to screen out or roughly endure the sounds of drills, of cars, of  planes, of seagulls and crows, of weirs and the wind in the trees, I really should learn to embrace these sounds, capture them properly and use them effectively in the resulting work.

At the very least the quality of the recorded audio that I use in my projects has needed to improve (I guess working with audio pros at BBC Radio 4 for the last few years has finally shamed me).

At Field Studies I was lucky enough to be in a group led and mentored by Esther Venrooy, who insisted that we spend two whole days of our allotted four simply listening and trying to write down on paper what it was that we were hearing. Here's one of my efforts:

The final two days were then spent creating a piece of work based on the paper description of sounds in a space over time produced by someone else in the group. Here's the audio sketch I received (it looks a bit like a Dadaist poem, I think):

Download ShoeFit

And here's my attempt at a sound piece that presents some of the sounds described inthe first section of the sketch:

Maybe their shoes don't fit? by moongolfer

During final presentation I asked the audience to 'fill in the gaps' - to add the sounds from the poem that weren’t in the sound piece itself – using a combination of flash cards and an animated sequence to prompt people into making the appropriate noises of shuffling, dragging feet, bloops, a-choos etc. You can try it yourself if you like by ‘singing’ along to the movie:

This course really helped me to face up to the reality of how hard it is to describe sound or to 'capture' it. In particular, I don't think I really appreciated how sounds slips and slides in and then away over time, so that no two 5-sec sequences are the same. Just by playing this movie twice and adding your vocal sounds a different way or in a different order, you'll understand what I mean.

And that wasn't all that Field Studies provided. When we weren’t working on paper or rapidly prototyping ideas, we were enjoying thought-provoking lectures. (One by Tim Ingold author of 'Against soundscape' I think probably requires a separate post). And then there was the work and thoughts of the other students to process and enjoy (although I had to leave early on the last day so I really missed out in this regard.)

What was most striking about the course in the end was how little time we spent playing with kit or learning how to use microphones or noodling with audio software. This was a bit unsettling at first, but I think I was ultimately persuaded that the gadgetry and the tech were nothing to worry about (well not too much, I guess).

Instead, I came away with a range of different strategies for becoming a more effective listener or hearer (cue distant laughter from my wife) - and I now have a much stronger sense of how one might  document and map a sound space *before* one attempts to record it. In some cases, I now think that hearing, listening and some form of visual mapping may be the *only* thing you need to do and no actual audio recording is required.

Now that really is a curious outcome of a week-long education in sound.

Ebb & Flow (and Issues of ‘Quality’)

Some months back, I was hired by Kate Pullinger and Tony Newman to help out with their wonderful Ebb & Flow schools project.

Andy Campbell (the genius behind Dreaming Methods) has done a fantastic job of capturing the energy, wit and imagination with which the kids tackled their digital writing assignment. Inspired by a single trip down the River Orwell, they’ve come up with loads of different ways of telling a story digitally – from short films to newspaper layouts to geolocated content to hand-drawn pictures.

Inspired, in part by Ebb & Flow, I thought it would be salutary to take the sounds and images I’d garnered from a recent walk and try to shape these into some kind of audio slideshow:

All the sounds and images I gathered that day are available to you all online on Audioboo and Flickr. And I’ve also created a map that shows you where we walked:

View Great Expectations in a larger map

What you’ll notice is that I’ve described this as ‘fairly basic’ and, as with quite a lot of my development work of recent years, you’ll find I’ve tried to cover my professional arse by (sort of) apologising for the amateurishness of my approach and the poor ‘quality’ of the media I’m using & making.

What Ebb & Flow demonstrates to me, though, is that ‘quality’ is very definitely in the eye of the beholder. Some of the drawings, the composite images and texts that the children have produced for this project are what I would call ‘pretty rough’. But thanks to the care and professionalism of Andy, Kate and others, it’s still been possible to develop perfectly acceptable sequences of collaborative digital writing.

We need to find more ways to allow people with different levels of ability and varying skillsets to come together in this way, I say. And we need a new aesthetic also, I'd suggest - so that the slick, high res world of professional TV and film doesn't set a standard of production & broadcast that could make it quite difficult to develop meaningful & energetic grassroots audience participation in a narrative project such as this.

Cyfle Workshop Slides

CROSS-PLATFORM WRITING

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: xpt writing)

Conversation with Christy Dena

A wide-ranging (and sometimes rambling - sorry) discussion:

Lots of other good stuff about current cross-media thinking from Christy at http://www.universecreation101.com/

Reading list for royal holloway

I've agreed to do some teaching at RHU (ulp!) and as part of that I'm meant to create a reading list. So this is my first stab: http://delicious.com/timwright1964/books+rhu

new dates for multiplatform storytelling for screenwriters

Next month I'll be doing my third round of courses for up to 4 people at a time. Basic info below and full details at http://www.01zero-one.co.uk/multiplat_story.htm

An intensive 4-day course to equip TV writers to develop projects for the Web and mobile platforms.

Outline: Intensive training on how to translate TV drama and entertainment concepts to the Web, mobile phones and emerging social & gaming networks. Places are limited to four per course to allow time for writers to develop their own projects, and participants will benefit from one month of on-line mentoring after the course ends.

Dates: 22nd and 23rd October, plus 5th and 6th November 2008

Multi Platform Storytelling Course for TV Screenwriters

"WRITERS:  Don’t lose control of your characters and narrative when interactive elements get introduced. Learn to write to the approved formats and deliver the correct piece of writing for Interactivity."

Digital writer Tim Wright will share a range of ideas and techniques that can empower writers to adapt and develop their creative output successfully in an increasingly complex cross-platform marketplace.  Who is it for? 6 Freelance writers in the Broadcast industry. The course is funded by the Skillset TV Freelance Fund and is offered at a greatly discounted rate.

See http://www.01zero-one.co.uk/MultiplatformStorytelling.htm

4 Talent Interview

In the run-up to B.Tween I was interviewed by Channel 4 for its 4Talent site. Here's the resulting article: http://www.channel4.com/4talent/feature.jsp?id=4127

Maps and Skins media project

Last month, on the invitation of some very nice people at Isis Arts and National Heritage, I visited Belsay Hall. There is a fantastic festival taking place here in the late spring/early summer involving such luminaries as Mike Figgis, Tilda Swinton, Anthony (of The Johnstons), and my mate Tim Hopkins, the very talented opera director and new media artist.

Running alongside the festival is a very exciting new media education project that I have been helping to specify: 

"a group of young people will work with a professional artist to develop, devise and create a virtual game. As part of creative workshops, led by the artist (and assisted by an education heritage worker) the young people will visit the Belsay site, take part in heritage-themed workshops, and devise creative scenarios, which will form the basis of a computer game creating an interface, which can also be used on the internet and via a touch screen console at the site. A first stage game will then be produced by a professional media company with experience of producing games, which will be launched at Belsay in July 2007."

Isis has now published tender documents for both the artist position and the media development partner. The deadline for submitting proposals is 28th Feb 07. More details can be found at http://www.isisarts.org.uk/opportunities.html