Artist Statement written by Rick Chestnut and Jared Richardson:
For our project, we chose to create a conversation between two members of a family that haven’t spoken in a while. This is a story based on a real communication between father and son. The son is very successful at what he does, and has several companies who want him in their employ. He is loyal, and finds it hard to make changes when an offer is made. It is always difficult to see the correct way to go. Besides being based on real experiences, the idea for our story came from a short story about how “jobs are like one big balancing act.”
This assignment was challenging for us in that it had to be procedurally generated, just like an exquisite corpse. Rather than scripting it all out, we decided to let the conversation between us happen naturally, over the course of a weekend. Originally we had an idea for how we wanted our conversation to go, but because of how the topic would change in our conversation (and because of our conflicting schedules in real life, which would cause our texts to be sent at sporadic times), we ended up telling a slightly different story than we had intended—with a much different ending than we expected. Additionally, each of us had a very different style of texting, which really shows through in the vocabulary, length, and even emojis used in our conversation.
With all this being said, we’ve learned that there is such a huge potential in using this type of medium to tell stories. While our execution was flawed, there are others who have learned to perfect the use of dialogue to tell a story. Take Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, for example. This 2001 video game by Capcom falls under the “visual novel” genre of games, where the story is told entirely through dialogue, with assistance from some basic images and animated sprites. Every part of the storytelling in the game is told through conversations between the protagonist, Phoenix, and the people he chats with, interviews, and goes up against in a court of law. Even Phoenix’s thoughts are discernable because he “mutters” them out loud (under his breath) for the player to read. Because of this system, which works exceptionally well, the entire game could convey its story without the visuals if it needed too, just like the script to a play.
Visual novels aren’t the only medium that relies principally upon dialogue. Some short stories, comedy sketches, and theatrical plays forego excessive visuals in favor of regular conversations between characters. The only difference between those and this project, however, is how (unless delivered through improvisation) they are all planned ahead of time. In our situation, the story was pieced together, little by little, to create a meaningful interaction between a father and son.
Collection of Dialogue-only stories: https://mjshorts.wordpress.com/tag/dialogue-only-stories/
No comments:
Post a Comment