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!