In our second week of lectures, we talked a little more about our assessments for this year. For the 360 film project, the brief is to create a 360 interactive film where the viewer can make choices throughout, affecting how the narrative unfolds. It’s also to be filmed entirely on the London College of Communication (LCC) Campus but edited in Adobe Aftereffects to make it seem futuristic. The narrative and editing are entirely up to us, which I love as it allows so much creative freedom.
My partner for the project and I made a document and discussed some initial ideas for what would be an effective, immersive narrative. We decided to set the film on a spaceship, where the remaining humans have escaped as the earth has become inhabitable. We thought it would be interesting to let the lore and the history of this fictional society be revealed as the player makes choices, affecting when they will uncover what information about the world. However, it would be a shame if the viewer was left with questions if they made certain choices and didn’t uncover certain information, so we decided it was best to reveal all, just at different points in the narrative based on certain choices. This way, the narrative plays out the same whatever the viewer decides to do, all information discovered, but provides the illusion of their choices making an impact (unless they were to replay it and make different choices, in which case, they would understand that whatever choice they make doesn’t really affect the story). We felt, though perhaps a slightly sly way of going about it, that this would make the narrative fully immersive for the viewer through a false sense of control over their playthrough.
The document with our initial ideas and planning, as well as our planning of the lore of this world, is linked below.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sKEQQkJ74BWwcevTaApRf953JwpeQNRYJPuodhetQaQ/edit