THE EXPERIENCE OF WRITING & STORYBOARDING:

Good writing should offer more than documentary authenticity or casual honesty. It should perform a function once the trust of religion, that of reconciling us to our experience of life, whether social, domestic or tragic. Through vision, heart, style and wit, art can redeem the experience it presents, rather than idly documenting the discontents of others and adding them to our own.

We should disregard the idea of a writer as a suffering artist, since scriptwriting of all kinds, far from being hard work, can be seen as a form of creative, insightful play.

“At some point films have to stop being films, being stories, and have to begin to come alive, so that people will ask themselves: What about me and my life?”
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, film-maker

There are many books describing the 'rules' of screenwriting, and although these can be useful at times, they can also limit a writer's ability to imagine spontaneously. Writing for interactivity is not like writing prose in a novel, but it is similar to writing scripts for comic books or film screenplays. Also, an interactive art form or genre doesn’t necessarily need a formal beginning, middle and an end - but it should definitely deliver an emotional high, a middle and a low.

The creation of accurately motivated characters is probably the most important contribution a writer can make to any script. Story and character development are intellectual activities, while the creation of good dialogue is usually a function of the ear, not of the brain.

Novels are born in silence; they develop and mature in silence. Scripts are usually talked into being, and the writers and artists must consider the input of many other creative people who contribute through discussion.

The script itself is secondarily a written thing; an elaborate notation, a codified description for other creative people to use as a guide. The words the writer puts on paper are not usually going to be read or photographed. They are structures of words that will ultimately be converted by designers, filmmakers and programmers into sounds, images and actions.

The script is undoubtedly an aesthetic creation, a form of dramatic memory with two basic functions; budgetary and psychological. It allows the producer to plan costs and gives the production team an action plan they can feel confident about. Once the team has taken on a job, the internal logic of the characters within the story can get lost in the mix very rapidly.

In which case, it is the original writer's talent and stubbornness that the team will need to get them through the fog of production, retaining meaning in the story and the integrity of the characters.

In most cases, a first draft script will represent not much more than an abstract treatment of the concept’s potential. The characters should be sufficiently developed and the story dramatic enough to attract credible investors and an excellent creative team.

During redrafting, writers will find themselves involved in an alternating sequence of reductions, expansions and revisions. Everything scripted can be completely changed once production begins; e.g. settings need to be altered, or two characters may have to be condensed into one. During the revision stages, clear-headedness and objectivity are prime virtues for the writers and artists.

Scriptwriters and storyboard artists can be certain of one thing; what they are developing will probably have to be redone once all the other collaborators apply themselves to the material. One of the most serious mistakes writers and artists make is to assume that a producer or director know what they are doing when they select a writer/artist for a particular job.

For most projects there is no ideal person and no foolproof method of selection. The 'rightness' of a person for any given project will hinge not on their rapport with the material, but upon their relationship with the other members of the creative team.

The challenge for the writer/artist is not only to understand the dramatic possibilities of the material, but also how the gifts and interests of team members relate to these possibilities. Students of film apply the French term 'auteur' to directors who so control every aspect of their films that they deserve to be regarded as sole authors.

The writer Harlan Ellison regards the auteur theory as 'corrupt', while Francis Ford Coppola emphasizes the crucial contribution of the screenwriter. Very few films or interactive games are the brainchild of one person, but rather the product of collaboration between a multitude of people using a variety of expensive equipment.

However, the majority of classic films, and games like Myst, Final Fantasy, Quake, and Septerra Core, have been guided by one visionary person – a person driven by the need to tell a story, who is able to inspire others to create a fully realised world into which the audience can escape.

In the development of interactive games, writers get it on paper; programmers make it work, artists make it pretty, designers make it fun and producers make it happen. The collaboration between producer and writer should begin and end with the money, but the collaboration between writers and other members of the creative team only begins with the money.

While money is a perfectly legitimate kick-off for taking on a project, the fascination for a writer/artist is that of collaborating with a range of creative intelligences of a very different sort.

What's needed in this work is imagination, an agile mind, and a facility for on the spot invention; also, tolerance, a sense of humour and a willingness to compromise. Literary genius or an auteur attitude, if you have them, can be problematic and should be left at home. What the producer really needs in a writer/artist is not just a passive interpreter, for there may be no original vision to interpret - but a creative reader of opportunities, (and sometimes an opponent). Someone who will scrutinize hunches and intuitions closely and objectively, looking for whatever unrecognized lines of development they may contain.

We apprehend physical reality, as we do art, film and multimedia, through the interrelationships of light, space, movement, time and sound - but it's absurd to conclude that these mediums are only concerned with the representation of physical reality. The dimensions of art are not the dimensions of 'the real world', but are created by artists and made articulate by them.

Once a project is distributed to the public it would seem to be complete, but the creative process hasn't ended, for the work of art is not the object but the experience of the viewer. Viewing too, is an act of creation, in which the audience's perceptions, experiences and sensibilities give unique meaning to the work.

In Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959, by Alain Resnais), the character Nevers says:

"I believe the art of seeing has to be learned."

And learning, like creation, never ends.

The screen may change but the scribe must still write and draw. When you receive a job brief, write and sketch some pages and get your own first reactions down first before you enter meetings with the client and other collaborators. Apply your imagination and ask questions about the sensations to be offered to the audience. When working with a development team, like any collaboration, the test of the group is how well its members work together.

Project development can be an exponential activity, providing the means to communicate ideas to a client, a cinema audience, one on one with a single interactive user, or between groups of people online, in a wide variety of traditional media, all at once or individually. Each media has a history and language of its own, the aim being to communicate an idea to an audience.

By overlapping images and sounds we can display many levels of understanding simultaneously, engaging them in a real-time experience.

It is possible for a skilled interactive designer to start work directly in the digital realm, relying on creative instinct rather than careful planning. With a well-equipped studio, the designer can sample voices and sounds, switch to other software to edit video, create gaming activities or 3D characters, then while rendering switch again to compose music.

All of this flexibility is great and can work well in an organic free-form context, producing outstanding if sometimes unpredictable results. On a commercial job it is doubtful that a client will finance the work until some kind of preliminary design or plan of action has been submitted for approval.

Does time fly when you’re having fun? Writers and artists must always be thinking about how the audience or the user will experience their creation. Write every idea down straight away; an idea is useless if it isn’t written down.

“Opposition is true friendship.”
William Blake