Enter the Storyplex

This week I’ve adopted a new word, “Storyplex”. It comes out of my research into telling stories in 360º spacial immersion. Stephanie Riggs refers to it in “The End of Storytelling - the future of Narrative in the Storyplex”. I was shocked when I read the title, wedded as I am to storytelling from 20 years of documentary filmmaking. With a dire sense of the need to keep moving forward, I immersed myself in this small book. It was delighted and immediately won over to experiencing stories in a new way in 360º digital spaces.

I use "digital" over "virtual" spaces because we are using photographs to create spaces at Nuvue Studios, either by taking multiple photos, up to 30 or more, and stitching them together, or by using spacial cameras with multiple lenses. The photos are stitched together in such a way that viewing them is like being being in a photo sphere.

Previously our films and videos told linear stories, with a beginning a middle and an end. In storyplexes, you get to choose where you look. It is no longer the film editor who chooses a sequence of shots. You, the guest, choose in look in any direction at any time. You are no longer restricted to seeing from the editors point of view. There would be a very real risk of looking in the wrong direction and missing the action if it were a linear story.

Developing a New Story Structure

Stories have structural devices that help a listener to “get into” a story. Perhaps a catchy title, where a world is turned upside down and needs to be righted. As viewers we identify with characters and experience the same emotions as the protagonist. We need resolution just as much as the protagonist does.

In storyplexes we are immersed in an experience of space rather than an satisfying an emotion need that we have “acquired” from the narrative. Character and plot emerge from the space itself rather than being imposed upon it. A short film might tell a story about an artist in an art gallery. We see from different angles, carefully edited so that we suspend disbelief and put ourselves there in time and emerge from that imaginary storytime, satisfied, as it resolves. In storyplexes, we do cross a space threshold, and experience being "there", in a reconstruction of a real life or a virtual space that we carry with us through time.

In storytelling we manipulate time so that we experience an event in however many minutes. In storyplexes the space is manipulated real or virtual spaces represented as 360 photography or as video for fixed and moving points of view.

It is part of the storytellers craft to manipulate time. In the storyplex, the plot and character is generated by the space and made possible with digital technology.