WALLPAPER

So far July has seen some fantastic progress on WALLPAPER. We’ve been working incredibly hard on graphics, atmosphere and lighting, and we’ve had our first sneak preview of the fabulous audioscape/soundtrack being created for the work by Barry Snaith. Exciting stuff.

Over the many years we’ve been making digital fiction, we’ve generally found ourselves constructing what we call ‘digital canvases’ onto (and into) which we write; WALLPAPER is no exception. Although we’ve been creating many short bursts of narrative texts and jottings (not particularly linearly) on both paper and screen, as well as sourcing images, textures, sounds and 3D objects, WALLPAPER’s story and the way it’s being told is evolving and transforming along with its gameworld.

Working in this way is both fascinating and freeing; a move away from the constraints of a script. In that sense, the writing and development process feels more like a “live performance” than a studious endeavor, with new possibilities discovered through discussion, spontaneous editing and on-screen experimentation (an approach we’ve explored before in our previous work, Inside, Clearance, Joyride and Nightingale’s Playground). It’s not without its problems – the work itself becomes the definitive draft or version, and the more complex it gets, the harder it is to keep it all structurally in balance. There is however something exciting about “uncovering” the narrative environment and infusing that intrigue and surprise impulsively into the story’s characters.

Watch this space for a video trailer/walk-through, plus some insights into how we’re handling the narrative programming and interactivity. Coming shortly. 🙂

In our last collaborative work, Nightingale’s Playground, which is comprised of four very different parts, we experimented with text in a three dimensional environment, allowing paragraphs from the story to ‘hang in the air’ and sentences to curl and weave like cobwebs around a claustrophobic house interior. We’ve always been keen to return to this idea – but to push it much further; WALLPAPER will allow us do exactly that, although the story behind WALLPAPER is very different to that of Nightingale’s.

WALLPAPER sees the main character PJ Sanders return to his family home following the death of his elderly mother. The reader/player takes the role of PJ as he arrives at the remote property, unfastens the boot of his hire car, pulls out a mysterious red briefcase, and heads into the house. His agenda is to close the place down and sell it – but he also has another task to do, involving the investigation of a locked room that he was never allowed to enter as a child.

Like wallpaper itself, this is a multi-layered work in terms of both media and narrative. PJ’s childhood memories and family history return to him in a medley of thoughts as he explores the house, examining furniture and objects draped in evocative personal recollection. Although parts of the story are told through very clear, almost subtitle-like paragraphs of two dimensional text, a large amount of it is as truly three-dimensional as any of the other elements of the WALLPAPER world.

As PJ moves through the house, we’re looking at developing ways in which the text can fade into existence, often with accompanying spoken word audio (whispers, echoes) before fading away again. Some of this text is presented as hand-written, circular, rotating and/or increasing in size with gentle motion. The results so far are fascinating and rather dream-like. The narrative is, in places, difficult or impossible to read in its entirety, but rather offers ‘glimpses’ of PJ’s thoughts and recollections.

As Edward Picot notes in his review of Nightingale’s Playground on Furtherfield’s website, Dreaming Methods has ‘always been at pains not to place text in front of images, or beneath them or to one side, like labels on tanks at the zoo or explanatory plaques next to pictures in a gallery… we have to explore to read. This avoids the danger of us regarding the texts as more important than the images. It pulls us in, and it makes [the] work inherently immersive and interactive.”