RED BRANCH HEROES – WRITING WITH MY AUDIENCES

The research presented here analyses the practices that a writer/designer needs to adopt to meet the challenges of active audience participation in new media platforms. The research does this through the construction of a working prototype that tests the writing practices used and plays out the resulting design with live audiences. The thesis underlying the research argues that visual storytelling is as important as the written word, that viewers expect greater involvement in the construction of stories and that improvisation is as important as scripted work. The study concludes that the techniques found in process drama are useful to writing in this medium but that these need to be supplemented with community-building gamification elements to build immersion. Writers working in these environments therefore need to work imaginatively with their viewers and co-creators to build stories. I suggest that the most effective way to do this is to construct a ‘negotiated narrative’, a narrative that is negotiated between makers, authors, and audiences. The prototype has been primarily designed to take place within contemporary Northern Ireland. The reasons for this setting are many and relate as much to my experience of growing up in Northern Ireland as they do to the lack of a serialised drama that engages the interest, hopes and aspirations of all individuals and communities who live there. Therefore, the research also asks if interactive forms such as transmedia offer any new storytelling potentials to the people of Northern Ireland. What advantages do stories that have been developed with the active participation of participants offer to post-conflict societies - societies that have experienced violent division and conflict. Evidence is presented in this study to suggest that the negotiated narratives formulated in this prototype offer further creative community-building possibilities, in neutral spaces that can facilitate discourses about the future.

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