2nd Blog – Flip charts and fantasies.

So I’ve practically drowned Sophie in paper and MAC are still not entirely sure who the mad woman stealing all their coffee (it’s me), but we have settled in for our first week here working on the script. We were hoping to be working on the technology as well but trying to get everyone’s schedules to work has proved a juggling trick too far so we are going to be doing that later in Aug. In the meantime we are ripping up and restructuring the script, developing backstories for the characters and ultimately trying to find the best piece of dialogue that we can use as the basis for the tech experiments in a couple of weeks.

The really good news is that not only have we got some lovely programmers to work with (Tom and Ben from Beef – yes, that really is their company name, we literally do have beef) and we are also meeting with a PhD student later this week from Mixed Reality Lab, who may be interested in working with us long-term, which would be AMAZING as one of our big hopes from this process was that we would find collaborations with technology people that would continue past this project.

We have had to scale back our ambitions but after lots of chats with I-shed and MAC it seems to make sense to do that. I think part of our over-enthusiasm is that we have never had this much time and support to develop something before so we are desperate to achieve as much as possible and get the full benefit of it. We are products of a production based theatre society, always looking for the end! Its taking quite a bit of restraint to just focus on little questions and take it step by step, it’s a very good learning curve for us.

Therefore for the time being we are making lots of charts and lists to help us navigate the story so we can develop a fully coherent world for ourselves, which we can then try visualising just a small part of.

You can see from the pictures that I have got quite obsessed with flipcharts. I’m not sure how I am going to cope without one now in my day-to-day life. I may have to get one installed in my bedroom.

Hopefully the pictures will also give a sense of the new structure we are working with for the piece and all of the extra details we have been discovering over the last few days through text analysis and improvisation. When Sophie didn’t know the answer to a character question or was unsure as to how a character might react in a situation then we set up improves to help us answer those questions. A lot came out about the colour baby pink and how teenagers randomly snog each other. Not sure how much will end up in the final piece but it was fun playing!

We have also hopefully narrowed down to which scene might be best to try and experiment on and we have started talking about how text can visually represent emotion and capture changes of attitude, pitch and tone. We’ve got some ideas now of what we would like to see happen and it will be a question of discovering how much is possible when we talk to the guys from Beef.

This week has so far been really helpful for us to understand what this world of the piece might be and if we know the world we are in then it should become clearer how we need to represent it with the technology and how the two might correlate. That’s the aim. Check back with us in a few weeks to see how far we’ve got!