For my final project, I went with the first prompt from Dr. Oblivion which was to create an interactive multimedia narrative essentially of the dangers of the AI takeover. I have always loved a good story and I love creating and telling them, so I thought getting to do something more writing and narrative based would be a good way to hone my skills that I’ve gotten to develop over this semester especially with projects such as reordering the songs of Dear Evan Hansen to change the course of its story, discussing the way that color plays a role in storytelling in The Corpse Bride, or even using a simple song lyric to create a more nuanced backstory for my course character.
As evidenced through my own character creation and the elements of design, writing, and aesthetic of my whole website and assignment choices, I’m very drawn to macabre and horror-based storytelling and with the prompt asking us to discuss implications of such an AI revolution, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to create a horror story. A bit of background for this: I am very against the big boom of AI, I avoid using it at every possible cost (which has created an ethical dilemma in this class, but I’ve cut my losses) due to the environmental damage it causes, the way that work is stolen from countless artists, the job displacement it creates, etc; I think it’s an ethical nightmare and not one where I believe the pros could outweigh the cons. Therefore, a perfect basis for horror in my own personal views. I also thought very heavily about how the world is what we make it and how all of the horrors around us that we face today came from the decision of someone somewhere, maybe even ourselves which is where I got the idea for a choose-your-own-adventure. In my own love for horror, my personal favorite style is surrealism; I was incredibly inspired by aesthetics like that of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and games like “Samsara Room” and “Cube Escape” by Rusty Lake. With all of the pieces put together, I created the basis of my interactive multimedia narrative: a surrealist horror choose-your-own-adventure set in a future ruled by an AI governance where you are the master of your own fate; or so the governance would like you to believe (EXTRA LINK TO PROJECT!!!)
I decided to use Prezi to create this! I know it’s normally a presentation software, but because the viewer can click the planet subtopics and be brought to any point in the presentation without a necessary chronology, I thought it would be perfect for this! The player can click the subtopic with their choice for that part of that story and follow the timeline of choices for those particular aspects.
In the process of creating this, I knew a few things: 1. with it being a narrative, I wanted this to be a very writing heavy project and 2. I have unfortunately had an insane amount of pre-finals week finals that have been due all throughout the month of April therefore making my time limited and prioritization key. That being said, this did not end up as multimedia as I had hoped or intended due to a lack of time as a whole and certain resources with the program I used (i.e I wanted to create and embed an audio for each new slide to play in the background, but I didn’t have time to do all of that and Prezi will not let me incorporate audio without a pro account).
The bulk of my time was spent writing the story and creating all the various endings (there are 4 main endings that are used with a few times, but with their own explanations and plotline and 1 unique ending that is exclusive to a specific story line; can you find the secret one-of-a-kind end?), and this took me quite a long time to write out and then put together especially on top of all of my other miscellaneous class projects and big presentations. In Canva, I put together a background design to showcase the connection of humanity to the digital world, but to also symbolise the reach that the virtual aspects of life have.
When creating the aesthetics of the presentation, I used a font that I thought felt futuristic yet also still legible to read text groupings in and I used layered circular subtopic aesthetics for each of the choices and made them translucent rather than their typical opaque to create a nuance, almost glitchy or laggy vibe that also felt very cyberpunk/tech inspired in my mind. I incorporated some images of Rorsachs in one of the storylines to create a visual element of uncertainty, but ran out of time to create more designs despite having worked on this project for 2+ weeks. I also spent about 3 days of that trying to sort out my audio situation as I hadn’t realized until the writing and aesthetics were complete that Prezi won’t let me embed audio that automatically accompanies the presentation without a pro account. So, I tried to troubleshoot for a while and then ended up just embedding a Youtube video of ambient horror music to really create a surreal and unsettling ambience that, to me, is one of the most important parts of surrealist horror. Sound, as we talked about in our audio weeks, can play such a pivotal role in the way our brains perceive elements of a story. The player can open the video in a separate tab and have the music playing in the background as they go through each part of the story.
This was a really long, arduous process and I do wish I was able to do more with it, but a lot of really intricate planning went into perfecting the narrative aspect and the storytelling which is really what this is all about. In the end, I incorporated elements of writing, design, and audio to create my surreal horror interactive experience and I’m really quite happy with the way the story came out and the way the mechanics function. I definitely wouldn’t have been able to create something like this without this class teaching me to think outside of the box when it comes to the various ways to tell stories digitally!