tim wright: digital writer

Interactive & Immersive Storytelling Masterclasses for NFTS and Channel 4

Now that I don’t have a course to run at NFTS (Creative Producing for Digital Platforms is no more, I’m afraid), I’ve been free to develop new ideas for workshops, development sprints, world building exercises and course modules that allow students and practitioners from many different backgrounds and disciplines to develop an interest in immersive development and production.

With students working from home and rarely being able to attend on campus, NFTS has been trying to offer more and more ways for people to engage remotely and virtually with the school, the curriculum and the film and TV industry in general. Lots of very cool people have been donating their time for free to talk to students about their practice. So when I was invited to do the same, it only seemed right to say ‘yes’.

NFTS/C4 Interactive & Immersive Storytelling 2020 from moongolfer

I split my 2 hour session into five parts:

• A bit of history about interactive storytelling dating back to when I started in the mid 90s
• Some basic principles of interactive drama and storytelling
• Social media and audience participation/contribution
• Live streaming and new forms of performance
• The Internet of Things, AI and immersive technologies

I tried to break things up with some short silly exercises for people to try, so it wasn’t just me talking all the time. Slides for my session can be found here: https://www.slideshare.net/moongolfer/nftsc4-interactive-immersive-storytelling-2020

I’ve now done this session twice – once for NFTS students and once for Channel 4 indies. Very happy to contribute to other events for free that are helping people stay in touch with each other and stay motivated about their practice and profession at this very difficult time.

A Conversation Game: NESTA Exploration Initiative

It was a real pleasure to get some of The Inspection Chamber gang back together again to develop some thinking  - and build a simple testable prototype - around the idea of next-generation smart speakers, combined with emerging AI technologies, offering new ways to develop more healthy and positive conversation and communication skills in the workplace.

The opportunity to work again with audio producer Nicky Birch and sound designer/artist Ben Ringham came through Catherine Chambers at NESTA, who had been developing ideas relating to the concept of ‘Digital Twins', one of the research subjects covered under the NESTA Exploration Initiatives programme.

Before the pandemic struck we managed to have one face-to face development meeting, and then we went to work online to script out a working prototype of a 'conversation game' that might be used as first step towards working out how one might have a healthy dialogue with one’s ‘digital self’.

Catherine has written a really useful article on Medium, entitled 'How might voice assistants help us have better conversations?', that describes well how we went from improvising work-related conversations across Zoom (with the one basic game rule that the words 'Yes' and 'No' were not be used) to developing a simple interactive sequence using VoiceFlow.

I won’t steal Catherine’s thunder by repeating her article - do follow the link above and give it a read. Just to say, this is a very interesting area of research for any writer seeking to use chatbots and AI to develop authentic character interactions and conversations within the context of a game or an interactive drama. If any other people are developing thoughts in this area and need a writer to help out, you know where to find me.