The theme chosen by the class was “casino murder mystery”, so this was the central idea and served as the inspiration for my team. We worked on including hallmarks of casinos such as gambling, deception, games, “people reading”, and more.
During our initial meeting in class, the script and story team brainstormed a list of potential ideas to draw from, such as murder methods, motives, characters, and more. Using this inspiration, each member of the team created a pitch compiling specific ideas. In our next meeting, with feedback from the team, I drew from these pitches to create a general outline and character descriptions to share at the producer meeting, which included a twist on the formula- there would be no murder, but instead, one of the patrons would fake their death.
I presented this outline and character list to the producers, who requested that a real murder also take place. With this new direction in mind, I met with my team to produce additions to our outline to include this feedback. In terms of accomplishments, by now we have a complete outline of the events that will take place, and brief descriptions of each character.
In our last meeting, we divided the work to be done among members, now working asynchronously to produce what the other teams need from us. We hope that this can be done by Tuesday, but that might be an optimistic prediction. The work has been divided as follows: Josephine will write player backstories and communicate them to transmedia design, Austin will come up with the clues and communicate with puzzle design about what players need to figure out and when, Giacomo will write character backstories, Justin will write the order of events, and I will manage production as a whole and communicate with the other groups about needs.
The main challenges I’m anticipating are mostly to do with timing and communication- the script needs to be done rather quickly to inform other areas of production, and that leaves a lot of stress on the writing team. I want to make sure that we work quickly and efficiently, but that nobody feels overworked as well. Additionally, because the story influences everything, we need deliberate, intentional, and fast communication with other teams. I’ve been doing my best to respond quickly to needs from the other teams, and I will probably have to remain available to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
With that in mind, there will be a lot of communication needs between Story and other teams. I’ve already nominated two people on my team to communicate with Transmedia Design about player backstories and Puzzles about murder mystery clues respectively, and I will also have to be ready to communicate with the other teams. This includes talking to Set Design about what environments and props we need, Costume Design about the characters’ personalities and styles, Actors about casting and implementing actors’ needs and requests into the story, and Transmedia Design about trigger warnings. We’ve already been in direct contact with some of the teams influencing the story, like implementing the shady casino manager suggested by Actors and the phony doctor from Puzzles.
Overall, there’s a lot of work to be done, but I’m very optimistic! Go team!
