Exercise - Developing the Production Theme

The final goal of this course is to develop a dramatic production composed of many individual vignettes. Each vignette is a short scene which conveys a fragment of a story. This way, student groups can work independently on different parts of the show but still bring them together into an understandable whole.

The suggested approach for organizing the whole production is as a pageant, in the medieval sense of a procession of scenes. Each individual scene might recount an event in a narrative, or simply explore an aspect of an overall idea. In this form, the emphasis is on the story which emerges from the composition of the events or ideas rather than the arc of individual characters. Characters don’t necessarily need to participate in multiple scenes, since each scene can be self-contained, and are more likely to exist more as symbolic roles than well-developed individuals.

As an example, consider the following overall theme: “Exploring the consequences of global climate change.” The vignettes could revolve around a lot of questions:

1. The underlying physics of climate change.
2. Specific predicted outcomes, e.g. the long-term rise of sea levels.
3. Choices which individuals make which affect climate change.
4. The dilemma of undertaking short-term disruption to solve a long-term problem.
5. The morality of inequitable contributions to both the problem and solution.

Each of these could be posed as a skit incorporated a few characters, an enactment of the science, a symbolic representation of a process, etc.

Part 1: Brainstorming a Theme

The objective of this step is to reach a group consensus on theme. Students should first generate theme ideas on their own, and then a consensus can be reached through discussion.

The theme should provide a common framework rich enough to enable an individual storytelling approach by each student group. Following are some prompt questions to help with generating ideas and building a consensus:

1. Start with a familiar story from a book or movie. Why is it interesting? Why is it meaningful? How would you categorize the story? Is there a more abstract class of stories from which it is drawn? That more abstract class could be the basis for a theme.
2. Start with a current event from the news. Why is it important? What is the history? Where are experts speculating it will lead? What fears does it raise? News stories are often framed as narrative arcs even if there is no clear beginning or conclusion. But a theme can revolve around an unresolved ongoing social or scientific question.
3. Start with a personal experience or difficulty. Why is it important to you? Do you believe others have experienced this? What makes your situation unique? In what ways is it similar to others’? Most of human experience is shared, and articulating the nuances of daily life can be a powerful source of stories with shared meaning.

The most important part is not to worry too much about the specifics of the choice: within any workable theme an unlimited number of questions and scenarios can be explored. The theme is just the creative constraint to use as a springboard to creating individual stories.

Lessons so Far

Before getting into working out individual story ideas, let’s review some of the lessons we may have seen from the previous story exercises.

1. The robot alone in a scene is a challenging form of storytelling. It focuses the attention of the viewer on the robot movement, but it is difficult to convey a story with just abstract motion.
2. Adding multiple characters creates an interactive context which can carry a lot of meaning.
3. Adding visual and auditory context can give the robot movement a lot of meaning.
4. One of the hardest movements to use is the pause. Silence is the background of music. Stillness is the background of dance.
5. The robot programming system easily generates abrupt, staccato robot movement. Expressing smooth movement is possible but requires a lot more work to compose.
6. The camera view tells a part of the story, and can be planned along with the action.
7. In general, higher production values can augment a good story, but not make up for a weak story.

Part 2: Choosing a Vignette

The objective of this step is for each working group to develop an idea for a short scene which develops an aspect of the theme. This is much the same as explored in Exercise - Building a Tiny Narrative, only now with the creative constraint of the topic.

The goal should be a scene or sequence which takes place in 30 seconds or less. It should use the robots for all movement, whether as characters, to move props, or move scenery.

Narrative and sound is permitted, although I suggest developing the primary visual content first; a dynamic scene is usually much more engaging than a static scene.

A good starting point is to hand-puppet the robots while developing the idea, following directly from the ideas in Exercise - Interacting Like Robots. After that students can write a program in Snap! to perform the scene autonomously or to enable remote puppeting (teleoperated acting).

All of the suggestions from Exercise - Building a Tiny Narrative still apply, so it may be helpful to review these in detail. The following prompts can guide you:

1. How is the scene related to the main theme?
2. Who or what do your robots represent? Are they based on a real or fictional ideas, persons, objects, or robots?
3. How does your character feel about the other characters? What does your character know or not know?
4. Actions are Revealing. A good principle to remember is that we cannot see emotions, but we do see the actions they prompt. Can you play out the emotions of the character and find the actions which naturally follow?
5. What happens during the scene?
6. When is this happening?

One-page Treatment

After brainstorming the essentials of the story, write out a one-page treatment which explains the following:

1. Who are the characters, or what do the robots represent?
2. Describe the physical setting. What are the scenery, costumes, and props?
3. Describe the action in a paragraph.
4. What is the text of the dialogue or narration, if any?
5. What are the sound effects or music? Please be specific.
6. How many individual camera shots will be needed? What action does each one show? What viewpoint does each one take?

Resources

A great general technique for brainstorming is Why-How Laddering, as presented by the Stanford d.school, along with many other methods.

Garth Zeglin, Personal Robotics Lab, Carnegie Mellon University