Electronic Literature

"An examination of the theory and practice surrounding the genre of electronic literature and exploration of its major works and authors."

Blog Post from Kate Pullinger

From Kate Pullinger--

I’m a writer with a long history of writing and publishing novels and short stories; for many years I’ve also written for film, television and radio. Since 2002 I’ve been creating digital work as well. I teach on an online MA in Creative Writing and New Media I helped set up – (http://www.dmu.ac.uk/faculties/humanities/pg/ma/cwnm.jsp). If you are interested, you can find my books and other digital projects on my website at www.katepullinger.com.

‘Inanimate Alice’ (www.inanimatealice.com) came about when a former student of mine, Ian Harper, approached me; he was developing a large project that included a film called ‘E|Mission’, a game, and a gadget, and wanted to put together an innovative viral marketing campaign to promote all three elements. After some discussion, we came up with the idea of publishing on the web a series of linked stories or multimedia episodes that tell the back-story of the main characters in the film, Alice, a games animator, and Brad, the game character she creates.

Though the original idea is not my own, I was given free reign on developing the stories for ‘Inanimate Alice’. For me, this private commission was a welcome opportunity to create further work for the web, with the added bonus of being able to work once again with one of my favourite collaborators, the supremely talented web artist and writer, Chris Joseph (www.babel.ca). We had worked together previously on ‘The Breathing Wall’ (www.thebreathingwall.com); our collaborative partnership worked well, despite the fact that Chris lived in Montreal, Canada, and I lived in London, England, and we were able to meet only once a year. Chris has since come back to live in the UK, but the first three episodes of Alice were created via e-mail.

We took a couple of decisions early on in the creative process that have proved to be very useful. We decided to tell the stories from Alice’s point of view, in the first person, and we also decided never to represent Alice visually – the reader experiences the stories through her first person voice, but without ever seeing Alice’s face. These decisions were made partly due to budgetary constraints – we had no money to hire actors, so could not represent Alice’s face, nor record her voice. However, we have found that these two decisions have worked well for us, helping to draw the reader into Alice’s world, while leaving the story very open to the reader’s own imaginative interpretation. The fact that you never see Alice’s face makes the reading experience more akin to reading a book, where characters are not represented visually and your readerly imagination is more fully engaged.

We made lots of mistakes with ‘Episode One: China’; the first draft of the script was too long, much too wordy and poorly structured. We didn’t properly understand this until we’d created a working draft, using Flash, of the entire episode. We then had to dismantle the episode and re-write the script and re-do all the work in Flash, which was laborious and time-consuming. With subsequent episodes we now make absolutely sure the script is finished before moving onto creating the episode in Flash. I’ve found that writing digital fiction has a lot in common with writing a film script; structure is of huge importance. Structure determines narrative pace, momentum, and tension. With episode one, after our false start, we realised we needed to begin with some kind of story hook, in order to draw readers in. All episodes, including episode four which is nearly finished, rely on a similar structure now: opening story hook, back story, resolution.

Chris and I collaborate closely on all aspects of the episodes, but we do have defined roles: I’m the writer, Chris creates the work in Flash. Together we collect images and sounds (episodes 1-3 used images and sounds found or purchased on the internet; episode 4 has been created using entirely newly created assets). Chris composes and creates the music. We have a lot of toing and froing over all the different elements, essentially co-directing the overall production. In a profound way, the narrative voice of ‘Inanimate Alice’ is the voice of our collaboration.

‘Episode Four: Hometown’ is nearly ready to go; our producer, Ian Harper, is looking at ways to finance further episodes by figuring out how to make money out of ‘Inanimate Alice’. While, as I said, the original idea for the project arose out of other projects of Ian’s, ‘Inanimate Alice’ has taken on a life of its own. We’ve won a number of prizes and the episodes have had multiple screenings at film and digital arts festivals: there’s a list of all this on our About page at http://www.brad-field.info/. To date we’ve been in discussion with game developers and a big range of content providers, but Alice has yet to find a commercial home. We’ve collaborated with a game developer to create an easy-to-use tool called iStories that will allow people to use their own stories, images, and music to create multimedia stories, and are hoping to release this later this year. So stayed tuned for future developments, as well as ‘Episode Four: Hometown’.

Kate Pullinger

posted by: grigar at 01/14/08 11:16 | link | comments (4) |

Comments:

#1  16 January 2008 - 22:37

 

Having seen the first episode of Inanimate Alice, I have to say I really love the masterful use of multimedia resources throughout. Once one rolls up their sleeves and tries to replicate this success, it soon becomes apparent you just can't put together any ol' picture/video/sound and come up with something this good. The viral marketing of the electronic device managed to slip under the radar too.

dhawthorne

#2  17 January 2008 - 00:45

 

I will let Kate know you have written a comment to her posting.

Thank you, Don, for taking the time to do this.

Best,
D

grigar

#3  19 January 2008 - 15:03

 

I have to say that the Inanimate Alice series has been my favorite so far of all the works we have viewed. I found myself really involved in the first two episodes and wanting to hear more about Alice's adventures. The third episode brought the new mechanic of the game, and I have to admit, I found myself not as involved in the story as I was in collecting the dolls. Next episode I plan on choosing to view the story without the game first, and then go back and do both. I can't wait to see the next episode and find out more about Alice.

bhook

#4  19 January 2008 - 20:00

 

One of its many strengths is the content. Kate is an excellent writer and so the story itself is highly engaging. We care about Alice in a way we do not learn to care about many electronic literary characters. And the feelings we have for Alice is what carries us through the various episodes.

--D

grigar

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