Story In Space

Way back in 2016 – just before 2016 went horribly, horribly wrong – we made a theatre show called Dark Land Light House, a sci-fi epic about a lighthouse in space. It’s the tale of Teller Ghent, the sole keeper of Lighthouse 5, whose responsibility is to alert interstellar shipping to the Dark Land: a mysterious, gigantic, changeable and immeasurable form, invisible to instruments, that somehow draws vessels towards its total darkness, in which they vanish forever.

It was a vivid and intricate storyworld that audiences responded to brilliantly. Sci-fi on stage is rare, and theatres were interested – but the logistics of touring were complicated, and we were never able to get the show on the road. All the same, we couldn’t let the story go.

Why VR

We began discussing how VR might capture and expand the scope of Dark Land Light House. As our understanding of VR developed (not least through Tanuja’s Expanded Performance Fellowship) we became convinced the story’s themes and tones – loneliness, hope in the face of daunting scale, cosmic mystery, wonky tech – would be perfect VR territory.

We wrote up a set of clear artistic ambitions for the final production (whenever in the future that might be) – a mission statement for how we wanted it to look, sound and feel as an experience. One of the trickiest things with developing art for new technologies is that the art can often come second to the tech in R&D… and we wanted to make sure we were always steering towards the artistic vision, even if it felt like a far-off horizon.

One of the core drivers for us was the possibility of making an experience that prioritised sound and music. The theatre show had an immersive cinematic soundtrack throughout, and we wanted to carry this over into the virtual realm – as well as giving careful thought to how a VR world might serve those audiences for whom the visual is not the best way of following a story.

Armed with these convictions we approached B+B R+D in 2021, and they were kind enough to offer us a Trailblazer grant to attack some key questions and examine Dark Land Light House’s viability. We brought some excellent people on board: producer Ellie Richold, who worked with us to identify the project’s needs and next steps; Alex Bertram-Powell, illustrator and 3D modeller and games developer, who helped us chip away at the aesthetic demands, drawing up some very early-days sketches. And this core team then connected with some brilliant folk who kindly gave their precious time to discuss our madcap schemes, including artist Hazel Grian, producers Emma Hughes (Limina Immersive) and Katie Grayson (Passion Pictures / Storyfutures) and game-maker Anton Hand (Rust Ltd.)

The Trailblazer funding allowed us to do some rapid concept development and research into funding, selling, workflows and visual design. It also gave us crucial time to explore the narrative design, story structure and scriptwriting.

It’s a story, not a game

I’ll focus here on scriptwriting. One of our big tasks was to figure out how to adapt the play. How do you structure a script that relies on tension and rhythm, for a 360 format that is intrinsically non-linear?

Dark Land Light House is a scripted drama, which is unusual for VR. Most VR is gaming; the narrative VR that’s out there tends to be documentary, or a more literary, narrated storytelling. So whilst we could use tactics from those forms, we would have to do some inventing and mashing-up of techniques too.

We’d envisaged our VR as an episodic epic, matching the storytelling ambitions of the stage show. Practical concerns rapidly drew us into big questions about narrative design, decisions that Tanuja and I suspected might be for later stages of development – but Ellie encouraged us to make some of them during the trailblazer. We began to shape a kind of ‘prologue’ to the main adventure of Dark Land Light House, an introduction to its world that could also function as a standalone story: a pilot, something that might be easier to produce as a satisfying working model. It was invaluable to have the time to think deeply about narrative design without having to build anything immediately, and towards the end of the process, I found myself diving into some script sketches for VR.

Organising 360 on the page

First up, it was useful to raise some script-geek questions, so apologies in advance for the geek out that follows. (“Mum, can you pick me up? I’m at the intersection of creativity and technology again.”)

Number one, what script format do you use for VR drama? The assumption seems to be that the grammar of VR most resembles that of the screen, but Sleepdogs’ hope is for an experience that’s less about ‘the frame’ and more about ‘time and space’… which all told feels closer to the language of live performance or installation. And what format best expresses the interactive qualities of VR? Should it be a games script like Twine or Yarn?

But in our discussions we’d established that we didn’t want Dark Land Light House to feel too much like a game; rather that on some level you were experiencing events with defined outcomes, a mystery with an endpoint (if not necessarily a definitive ‘answer’). Alongside Ellie, we kicked around the idea that maybe the most important interactive element was the choice of whether or not to spend time in a place – to prolong a feeling, or not. So maybe the most empowering mechanic would be a simple ‘continue’ function, a kind of ‘press here to move on,’ allowing the audience to advance the story or hang around in the world a bit. That leads to compromising an essential dramatist’s weapon: urgency. But then that’s how novels operate, right? So there has to be a way it can work.

In the end, I gravitated rapidly towards using screenwriting software – but then I often use Final Draft for other kinds of script, too. There was a practical side to it in this instance. We’d agreed that the script should function as an audio drama might, in order to prioritise the soundscape – and many of my audio dramas are written in screen format because I enjoy the mental crossover with the visual side of my practice, the ambition raised when you write a radio play as if it’s a film without a camera. (This technique has landed me in trouble before. People have sometimes suggested just adding a few details to one of my radio scripts in order to generate a screen adaptation. I mean I massively disagree with the tactic… but you could also see it as an indicator of how vivid the images are that audio alone can prompt.)

As I wrote, I found that I was thinking about pace in a different way to anything I’d write for ‘pure’ audio, or stage, or screen. If we were giving our audience the choice to spend time in contemplation or move on, it struck me as wisest to mark those moments in the story as soon as possible. So where were the spaces between the story beats that would allow this?

There’s a theory of dramatic writing that involves a kind of fractal expression of acts. So your full story has, say, 3 acts. But in turn each of those acts has 3 acts, and also each scene can be defined as having 3 acts, each exchange or set of actions within the scene also has 3 acts. Yep: it’s 3 acts all the way down. I’m not sure it holds up entirely to proper, rigorous academic scrutiny but it’s a useful strategy if you’re intending to allow the action to be paused at certain moments, to avoid it feeling disjointed or wantonly odd – and that was how I instinctively decided upon where the ‘hanging’ points would arrive.

But beyond that, the conventional dramatic wisdom would have a writer end each self-contained scene on a moment that would make the audience want to proceed directly to whatever follows, keeping them hooked. Here the narrative design would be different. Instead, there would be a choice of when to move.

Feeling it

Music-making strikes me as one of the better models for thinking about this kind of writing. In particular I use a software called Ableton Live for pretty much all my music production these days. One of its functions is to allow a complicated combination of looped elements to interact, to come and go, according to the player’s instincts. It can be extremely meditative. You can spend ages enjoying a repeated element because you know that once it feels right, a button can be hit to move it all along in some way. It rewards deep listening.

So while I was constructing my Dark Land Light House script sketch, at the same time I created some music in Ableton to accompany it…then ended up writing to that demo, letting it cycle, hitting the button at points where I thought the audience might choose to continue. This isn’t stress-testing our concept by any means, but it certainly helps to make headway. We hope Dark Land Light House might feel like a place you could spend some quality time – and where the precise nature of that quality would hinge on a simple choice you made from moment to moment.

Whenever we approach a new Sleepdogs project, we find ourselves asking: how do we want this to feel? The virtual environments of VR are immersive in a practical sense, but this R&D has allowed us to start working out how we might move towards creating an experience that feels transportive and enveloping on an emotional level too. It’ll be a long (and expensive) road to making even the pilot episode, but hopefully, piece by piece, moment by moment, we’ll get there.

(Photo credits: Eno Mfon, Jessica Macdonald and Derek Frood in DARK LAND LIGHT HOUSE by Sleepdogs, Bristol Old Vic 2016, production design Rosanna Vize, lighting design Ben Pacey, photography Paul Blakemore)