"Murder on the Racecourse" - Jill Drysdale - 14th April 2011

The story of the unfotunate events relating to Eliza Gepson have captivated our group for nearly 4 months now. Everyone is still unsure exactly who killed her, but that hasnt stopped us putting together our own theories. I personally have been looking forward to Jill's talk for a while now. The story just seems so fascinating. Perhaps its to do with my love of Family History. The notion of knowing so much about these people from years ago really appeals to me.


The talk was excellent. Every time we hear the story, we get more and more information which only serves to make the story all the more exciting!

We will never know for certain how Eliza died all those years ago. Perhaps the strangest thing about her story is that she was not alone. Thousands of unsolved murders have piled up over the years, but her story captivated Jill enough to put her time and effort into researching it.

PERFORMANCE DAY - 09-04-2011

The day of the event dawned sunny and warm - indeed a blessing in this country!

Session 13 - 06-04-2011

Some good news! After submitting an event notice to the Creative Torbay website, we finally got featured in the newsletter! It was so rewarding to see our little event being promoted alongside some well-established local organisers. Creative Torbay is a must-use resource to anyone planning an event in the Torbay area!

Also on this day, the group travelled to Totnes to have a dress run of the performance on Saturday. Decked out with costumes and props, we travelled around the various locations to talk to the owners of various pubs and cafes, to run through lines and important points to remember, as well as to decide who would be standing where.

This session was a useful reminder about the importance of preparation. Each character had to have a few point to discuss on the day with any passing app users to make the day that little bit more interactive! We also checked on any last-minute prop or costume issues to be sorted by Saturday. All we can do now is go home and sleep ready for the big day!

Here are some snaps from the dress run:

Dress Rehearsal

Florence Luscombe - Journalist - Ayla Kerr

Frederick Kellock - Coroner & Local Solicitor - Louis John Brzozka

John Chapple & Thomas Palmer - Boatman and Publican - Alex Ward and Josh Atiya-alla



Mary Ann Sage & Mary Alley - Local Woman and Waitress - Claire von Hoesslin and Louise Gorvin



The Flower Girls - Steph Steele and Charlotte Robbins

Session 12 - 31-03-2011

Session 11 - 24-03-2011

Catch-up and Progress Meeting

Session 10 - 17-03-2011

Second Testing Session

Session 9 - 10-03-2011

First Testing Session

Session 8 - 03-03-2011

Back from a week out, the team return for a full ships compliment!

This session was intended to finish up any outstanding recordings, check on the progress of the different groups, prioritise tasks that need to be done, discuss the logistics of the final event and generally move the project forward.

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Emma allocated jobs to various members of the group before the session. Claire and I went to the recording studio to re-record the introduction speech; Ayla, Josh and Louise went to the library to work on the poster; Alex and Vicky sorted through the soundscapes they had recorded over the last few weeks, before passing them over to Charlotte for final editing.

After our short and painless recording session we met up with the rest of the group as they were getting to work. People were buzzing around discussing their roles and their progress. The air was generally upbeat and enthusiastic.



Emma took me aside to discuss a few issues arising. We discussed how we were going to invite people to attend the event. So far, we have the website, an entry on CreativeTorbay and a Facebook event for friends and family. Emma suggested personalised invitations to certain groups in Totnes and other notable figures. I am in the process of compiling an invitation list of Totnes groups and people who have helped us in planning the process.

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We ended the session with every group updating their peers as to where they are. As it stands, nearly all the conversations are edited, the soundscapes are taking shape, the poster is still being compiled, transport has been arranged for next weeks testing trip to Totnes and everyone knows what they need to do for the next week.

Finally, taking advantage of a full attendence, I grabbed a quick photo of the students!

Session 7 - 17-02-2011

Recording time!



The second of our recording sessions was booked in a proper recording studio. The quality of soundproofing and technology made the process both more professional and more enjoyable!


As an added novelty, we had a full compliment of cast! This meant that we could crack on to get all the recordings done today.

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To start the session, we all gathered in the recording studio to discuss any changes to the script or any problems people were having with lines or accents. My role today would be to work with the cast on the vocalization and characterisation of the script, mostly helping with accentuation, diction, pace and clarity.

The recording crew decided to record everything at least twice if possible to facilitate the editing process. This allowed me to give input from within the recording booth to try and improve each speech the second time around.

The headphone intercom system allowed for us to be in communication with the people on the sound desk, who would offer technical advice to optimize the recordings. The technical setup in the studio was a novelty to those who had not experienced it before, but ultimately it was very fit for the purpose of which it was designed.

Sitting in on the recordings was wonderful. To hear my script come off the page was such a brilliant feeling. I was also great to see the vocal talents within the group, especially from those who I had not heard much from over the course of the process.

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The recording desk where the technical magic happens!

Session 6 - 10-02-2011

Script drafted!

Its been an interesting process trying to shoehorn all the information into the text, laying clues for the participants, creating interesting and diverse characters, all whilst trying to keep it short enough to maintain audience engagement. After gaining feedback from Jill (researcher) and Shiona (playwright), the positive reaction was very encouraging. Between them, they offered some very useful criticism to act on when redrafting.

Armed with the new script, I arrived to find...3 students out of 7...

Another disappointing attendance, especially with all 3 students assigned to the graphic design being absent. As we are running to a tight schedule, the two weeks assigned for voice recordings we all we had. Luckily, we had one of the larger parts avaliable to record. (The Narrator)

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Session 5 - 03-02-2011

The session today started with a meeting. The main purposes were to address the issues regarding distribution of roles, to read through the parts of the script that I had completed to date, and most importantly to allow the group to express their views on my strengths and weaknesses in my role as a teacher.

This proved to be a useful process. The group were generally very positive about my skills in my teaching role, yet we also picked up a few issues that I need to address in the near future. This will hopefully allow me to improve my skills as the process continues!

After the meeting, Colette took over to do some work on characterisation, which I felt linked very well with the work we started last week.

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After a break for lunch, we had a chance to use the recording equipment. As the whole cast was not present, we worked with the voices that we had. We played around with the parts to give everyone a chance to do some recordings. As part of the testing, we looked at factors such as background noise, distance from microphones, breathing whilst recording etc.



We found that the microphones cancelled out much of the background hum in the room, making recordings feasible. We also highlighted issues with the deeper male voices with regards to the distance at which they should talk into the microphones. We also took a brief look at some of the effects that you could put on voices to change pitch and tune, which may be useful to turn a female voice into a more convincing male voice.



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To end the session, we had a brief meeting to decide provisional castings. Most people seemed to have a good idea about what part they would like to try. This made the process of assigning parts very simple. We may still have to change some parts if we have problems with illness or attendance etc.

With the parts assigned, we took a look at the narrative paths and locations that we tested on Sunday 30th Jan. I explained to the group about the options available to participants with regards to the routes they could choose. I showed them marked on a map as well as how they appear on a flowchart. By planning each route with specific directions, we found that all the routes were entirely possible!

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This session was very productive. I gained some great feedback on both myself and the script. Colette's session about characterisation fitted in very well to get the students thinking about how to give personalities and back stories to the characters in our piece. The session in the afternoon with the recording

All in all, a very good session! Back to writing the script then...

Session 4 - 27-01-2011

Today's session was due to be cut short due to an external production visiting the college. We were also plagued by illness, cutting the team from 7 down to just 3. After moving room, we only had just over 1 hour to work together!



Not to be put off, we made the best of the situation. Following on from the session on Monday, I set about finalising the order of the nodes, as well as assigning the chosen characters to the most appropriate locations. Thankfully, there was little trouble in matching people to locations. Every node seemed to have a perfect character to match it. This would help to make the script easier to write and more believable.

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In the session, after a recap from the session on Monday, I drew the narrative paths and character locations on a large poster. I explained to the group how I imagined the paths would be between the various locations, reassuring the group that they were all within comfortable walking distance of each other.

After we had agreed on the character locations, we began to discuss the characters themselves. Although they were all real people, little or nothing is known about their personalities. This gave us the freedom to assign them more creative and theartical characters, often giving them more extreme and focused character traits to fit the story.

I noticed that often people would all see a character in the same way. For example, everyone imagined the waitress Mary Alley to be a young, busty, ditsy barmaid. While this may seem like stereotyping, it proves very useful as part of the characterisation process. Often the stereotype is perfectly suited to the character, as long as the characters are still made believable.

At the end of the session, we looked briefly at possible assignment of roles, but with the characters likely to change and less than half the group present, we decided to end the session there. I then went away and typed up what we had agreed ready to send out to the other group members.

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Despite the poor attendance, I feel we made the best of the session. Having a smaller group does allow people to better express their thoughts and ideas. Now that we had agreed the order, I could start to structure the writing process for myself, knowing which nodes needed to be independent and which were experienced in a specific order.

On Sunday, I planned to visit Totnes to check if the routes were feasible, and if so, to plan out directions to program into the application.

Until then, its back to writing the script!

Session 3b - 24-01-2010

With the tremendous amount of information gathered from our last session, we had a lot of ideas to work with. As such, we decided that we would have another smaller session on Monday to begin to work towards assembling a story.

Despite the poor attendance for the session, I feel that we still made progress.

We discussed the different types of narrative style to decided which would be best for our story. This involved deciding on the point of view of the story:

1st Person "I walked into the pub..."
2nd Person "You are walking into a pub..."
3rd Person "She/He entered the the pub..."

We made a tentative decision to have a Narrator to give a general impression of the scene, a short history of the location, point out things of note etc.

We also decided that the story would be in the format of a journalist talking to witnesses via a short dialogue. We aim to keep the recordings fairly short so as not to overload the participants with information. We will invite them to take their own notes over the course of the audio tour.

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After a break, we looked at the order of events and how we might translate them into our story. As we decided to set the story from the point of view of a journalist who arrives in Totnes on the day of the final inquest, this meant that we didn't have to stick to placing events in chronological order. As an exercise, everyone was given a chance to map out an order of events as they saw it. While everyone came up with a different order, they all agreed of the format of a journalist speaking to witnesses. This gave me a great opportunity to plan out the story to best suit my proposed style of writing

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This session was very useful in defining a clear story in my head. With the help and input from the students, I began to pull my creative ideas together into a more focused writing plan. I now had the characters, the locations and the writing styles. I now felt happy to start writing!

Session 3 - 20-01-2010

For me, this is where the project really starts.

We arranged to meet in Totnes at 10am. Sandy, our tutor, had kindly offered her house for use as a base for the day. Emma had arranged for us to access the local records at the Totnes Study Centre. However, when she was arranging it, she found something much more promising.

Once we had settled in with a cup of something hot at Sandy's house, Emma produced a document that she had found. It was an article written about a cold-case murder from 1866 that was commited in Totnes. After reading through the story, it became clear that this story was ideally suited for adaptation. The places, characters and mystery were all there.

Another positive from this was that the author of the article, Jill Drysdale, happened to work at the study centre. She was very pleased that we had taken an interest in her work, and she was more than happy to give us a detailed run-down of the story.

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Now that we had a story, we could spend the morning looking at the people, places and history in more detail. The enthusiasm was at an all-time high, with people starting to form suspects and motives amongst themselves.



After lunch, we shared the findings from our research. We made notes of characters and locations, which we intend to use as part of the the initial story devising process. Then Collete took over to work with the group on some devising techniques. She ran an exercise out in an alleyway in Totnes where each member of the group would find a spot and sit/stand for about 15 minutes. They would allow themselves to not only hear sounds, but to pick out the qualities of the space. For example, how the sounds travel throurgh the alley, how the wind feels, how the sun looks on the walls etc. etc.

This process can yield some impressive results if people give it the engagement it deserves. By relaxing and letting your senses to take in the surroundings, people begin to pick out things they would otherwise have missed. This would be a very useful skill to develop when writing the narrative for our story.

For the last part of the day, I had originally intended to take the group around a few locations that I had earmarked in my initial research. However, with the emergance of the new story, I felt that it would not be as useful.

Although this was a little unfoirtunate, I still had another short demonstration to show. I had recorded a basic text relating to the Church of St. Marys in Totnes High Street. It was a passage from a guide book from 1970 describing the building of the tower in the 1400s. I added a short piece of music to replace a soundscape.

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I stationed the group outside the church and instructed them all to play the recording. I had included a section that described 3 stautes half-way up the tower. It was interesting to see most people scanning up the tower whilst following the narrative.

After playing the recording, we retired to Sandy's house to discuss the recording. The group picked up on things they liked, things they wanted to include, as well as things they felt didnt work. This served as a useful exercise to both show my ideas of how to structure the nodes, as well as serving as a troubleshooting tool.

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This session has proved to be very useful. The biggest step forward has come from finding a story on which to base our project. This session has left me with high hopes for the future of the project!

(Next meeting is on Monday to begin the devising process)

Session 2 - 13-01-2010

Week 2 of the project. Behind the scenes, progress is being made. This was the week where we planned to test an Interactive Narrative in Ashburton. This would be both to give the group a first-hand experience of how the project should work, as well as highlighting any potential problems. We met at 10am and got started.

However, our old friend technlogy was not playing ball as usual. We found that the software had to be changed slightly to work on the software on some peoples' iPhones. This cost us valuable time. We also came up against another potential problem (albeit beyond our control) - The great British weather...

From the process, we highlighted a number of strengths and points for improvement. We also learnt a few things that would be important to take into account during the creative process. (A full list of these will follow soon)

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While the groups were going out to test the software, I ran a session with the remaining students. I called on them to share some of their ideas for the content of the project. In hindsight this was not a very positive session. By allowing a large amount of creative freedom, many people got carried away with discussing smaller details and outlining problems for all the various ideas. The session began to lose its structure. It was at this point that Sandy stepped in and suggested to me that I should take another look at my role. She reminded me that the creative process was my own, and that the details would ultimately be decided by me. While I could consult my students for opinions, I should not give them too much to create themselves.

We took a break, which gave me time to reflect. I concluded that I needed to take control of my project and assert myself in my role of working on Creating and Devising. I had planned a meeting for that afternoon, which I intended to use to try and bring the process back on track.

It was then that it occured to me. The key thing to remember is that this is a long process. It has been scheduled in such a way so as to pace the work. It seems that people began to worry too much about the finer points of the project, and as such the session became unproductive.

Looking back, it was all part of the learning curve for everyone. I now feel a lot more secure in my head with regards to my role.

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Session 1 - 06-01-2010

Week 1 - Project Introduction

Today was the first session with the cast of the project. The session started with a wonderful in-depth contextualisation of the whole idea behind the project by Emma Whittaker. This included a look at some of the material from the test project designed for Ashburton.

Then it was over to me :-)

I started with a brief explanation of my role in the project. I said that I would mainly be working with them on the creating and devising process for the next few weeks. I had planned a few short exercises to the get their creative juices flowing.

1. Improvisation Game - Park Bench - Participants are given strange personalities and sent to sit on a park bench one by one. They will interact with their fellow actors to create a scene

2. Linking Game - Film Styles - Based on the "Whose Line is it Anyway?" game. Two participants act out a simple scene. They will then be made to re-run the scene in the style of a film (e.g. Western, Musical, 20's Gangster, James Bond)

3. Devising Exercise - Scene from a Stimulus - Participants are split into groups. They are given an object, a word or phrase from which to devise a short piece of theatre. They are given about 10 minutes to create a piece

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After Lunch, we had an hour session to start thinking of ideas for the content. I explained in a little more detail the ideas I had thought of beforehand. I also showed the cast a picture of the area that we would be focusing on in Totnes.

It was clear from this early stage that people had a lot of interesting ideas for both the recording content and for a possible theatrical accompaniment, and as such were keen to make the project their own.

As an initial devising task, I asked the cast to conduct a little of their own research into Totnes. This would include looking into possible locations, as well as researching any interesting local legends or stories on which to base the story.



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Overall, the first session has left me feeling very positive about the future of the project. The quality of the devised pieces that were created in such a short time was truly astonishing - A very heartening sign indeed!

With the second session promising a visit to Ashburton to test the audio, I hope that the cast will have a good idea fixed in their heads about how the project will work. Until then, its back to the research!

Welcome to "Interactive Drama Totnes 2011"

Hello and welcome one and all!

Thank you for taking an interest in our project. It is still in the very early stages of development, so any input would be welcomed!

For those who may not know, we are planning to create an Interactive Drama experience in Totnes. The story will be written specifically for Totnes, with Totnes landmarks used as inspiration and as the stages for the final piece.

The project involves the Apple iPhone. The participants will travel around Totnes guided by voice recordings, which will be played through headphones to tell a story based on where they are in Totnes.

The project will draw on the knowledge and stories of the residents of Totnes, which will be used to write the story.

If this project interests you, or even if it something you might like to see and hear when we are finished, please follow our blog to stay updated!

At the moment, we are looking at a date around Easter (this is still provisional)


Thank you for reading, and on behalf of the team, we hope you will follow our process with interest!