BBC R&D
Commissioned by the BBC R&D Team
In August 2019, I went to work with the BBC R&D team to experiment with their StoryFormer and StoryPlayer tools in order to create a number of short stories using text, audio and other media which respond to the audience in a number of ways.
StoryFormer is a tool developed for creating flexible, responsive media. By using this tool, the flow of a story and the media used to tell it can change dynamically and responsively to the viewer’s input, their preferences, or their context. This can happen either before the story starts, or while the experience is underway. Perhaps the same story unfolds differently for every viewer? Or maybe various parts of a story can be explored at the users will - they could expand a particular subject and choose to neglect others. Finally, the audience might take on a role of responsibility in a narrative, by having to make decision about the future direction of the piece. All of this flexibility is under the producer’s control within StoryFormer’s user interface.
My aim was to explore the affordances and combinations of such a tool and come up with a number of examples of user-experience design, which could be used as templates or design patterns for new narrative forms and to find new insights in to the ways in which audio and text can be combined to create new narrative structures.
I created an interactive piece with two intertwining narrative threads based on a users visit to Sissinghurst House in Kent - and the mysteries that lay in the history there.