Drawing on her experience of working as a Producer and New Media Consultant for Channel Four,Hide&Seek and Storythings, Kim Plowright came to the Studio to talk to us about the life cycle of projects - from development to post-release. Kim had been working on web based and 'trans-media projects' for 15 years across different organisations, and has been freelancing for the last 5 years. Her practise involves putting ideas into action, and setting up structures for creatives to work with. Despite having no formal background in writing, Kim has found herself working mainly on narrative projects over the last few years.

Kim Explained that the subtlest narratives can still have a rigid underlying structure. Research has shown that we are hard-wired to compose these structures, as we are hard-wired to be affected by them. The set up, setbacks and resolutions take us on an emotional journey, and research has shown that we are hard-wired to be affected by these basic narrative structures. Evolution has wired our brains for storytelling. Narrative structures take advantage of our cognitive biases (quirks in our thinking that make us perceive things in odd ways - more here). An example of this is the serial position effect; When recalling a list, we tend to remember the very last things on the list, and also, perhaps, the first. When talking of narrative structure, this translates as the peak bias rule, where we pay more attention to the peak and the end of a story, and this colours our recall. A mediocre film with a fantastic finale will probably be remembered quite favourably, as opposed to a good film with a disappointing finale. Whilst working through narrative structures on these kinds of projects, Kim said that the highs and lows of these narratives can often be mirrored by the highs and lows of working through a project itself. More about neurology and storytelling here, here and here.

The write, design, pre-build, shoot, test, post project phases, traditionally marked out in mediums such as television, do not apply to the kind of online narrative projects that Kim is involved with. In pre-recorded broadcasting, once the release button is pressed, the majority, if not all of the work is done. In Kim's projects, this is just the beginning. Because of this, the plan and maintain phases have proven to be vital.

Kim told us that the process of finalising a narrative project can be so exhausting that you can feel dispirited at the point where you need to be the most enthusiastic. It is a common occurrence that these emotional lows can sabotage a project. Sometimes this can become much more likely if a team takes on too much. We heard about a hugely ambitious project that Kim worked on called ROUTES, which was a multi-platform project, conceived to teach kids about genetic manipulation. This project involved creating a fictional world, comprising of an eight-part documentary, fictional websites and social media accounts. When the team printed out a spreadsheet of the project's narrative structure, and it was the size of a wall, they began to realise the colossal task they had set themselves. They threw more time, content and money at the story to less and less effect, realising that their audience didn't have enough time to see all the details of the story they had woven, and that the amount of people who viewed the live streaming didn't warrant the amount of energy invested in bringing it about. This was a learning curve for Kim, who realised the importance of carefully considering the way an audience might want to approach content.

In 2011, Channel 4 approached Kim and Hide&Seek about making a game 'about dying alone', designed to sit alongside the Channel 4 documentary; Dreams of a life. This was obviously going to be a difficult project to approach, as it was based on the true, tragic tale of Joyce Vincent, a women who lay dead in her flat for 3 years before being discovered. The project was called Dreams of Your Life, and has been described as 'the saddest thing on the Internet'. Whilst forming the project, the team decided to make the game as simple as possible, giving people room for reflection. A.L. Kennedy, writer on the project, wrote a narrative coming from one, melancholy and familiar voice, which the player engages with, answering questions. Forming the backdrop to this conversation is a scene of a window in a flat, which changes subtly from a clean and bright scene to a cold and decaying one. Players receive occasional emails from this voice for the next three years (giving an unsettling sense of the time Joyce lay undiscovered). The emails are written to gently prompt the players in thought and action, encouraging them to reconnect with people, by, for example, offering to keep a key for a neighbour in case they get locked out, or returning something that they had borrowed and kept for years. Considering ways that people could find their way in to and out of such delicate content proved to be a challenge, but a wholly worthwhile one.

This year, Kim was the online producer for D-Day: As It Happens, a multi-platform Channel 4 production. For this project, Kim organised the Twitter stream, where the stories of 7 real people who were alive at the time of the Normandy Landings were told from their own points of view in real time using genuine historical records. The tweets were sent out over 24 hours, in which people read about characters like George Honour, who was sat in a tiny submarine, smoking and frying bacon, becoming intoxicated by too much oxygen, and Mary Verrier, anxiously waiting for the first wave of casualties to treat. The project took on a life of its own, and people's responses were totally unexpected. One man, responding to a story about carrier pigeons, sought out and shared images of a local memorial dedicated to them. He scattered birdseed as a thank you for the role they played. An illustrator began drawing the characters, and people started requesting that she draw different things. When one of the characters, Dixie Dean, died, there was a huge response, and people visited his grave to pay their respects. The event had 14,000 followers, and people are still tweeting about the characters months after the event. Rather than ending on a low complete, for many, the project ended in catharsis. The team took care to consider how people would engage with the live feed, respecting the different ways that people interact with the Internet, and ensuring there is room for 'froth'. This word has become an important one for Kim; it refers to the aftermath of an experience/story, where people share their thoughts and experiences with each other, usually on social media.

Kim gave us a few tips for truly thinking through the way that people find their way in and out of your project; at the very beginning of your project, try to compose the ideal tweet that someone might tweet at the end of your project. If you can't do it, then neither can your audience. Build your project for a friend, or someone who has no connection to the work you are doing. Think about audience aftercare - how can you ensure froth, and connect people? Create products/ projects that take into account the fact that people are busy (like twitter, or reading list app, Pocket).

It was wonderful to get these sorts of pointers about how to approach and structure projects from someone who has worked on so many fantastic and complicated undertakings. Whether working on a narrative or non-narrative project, the advice to treat a project as a sort of narrative structure, and carefully consider each separate part, is undeniably useful.