These conversations took place in response to an invitation to take part in the Kallisions Artist Development programme with Kaleider in Exeter. As a total technology and digital theatre novice (and long-time cynic), I wanted to learn more about this world that forms a large part of many writers’ work, so set up a few conversations to try and find out more.
Hazel Grian is an interactive sci-fi, fantasy and comedy writer of some repute, having worked on Alternate Reality Games for movies such as Star Trek. She is also a Transmedia consultant to broadcasters and brands and has been a studio resident at Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol since its opening. More recently, having spent a year at Aardman Digital as a Creative Director, Hazel is now Creative Ideas Developer at Bristol’s Knowle West Media Centre.
Photo PM Studio
What was the route towards making the work you’re doing now?
I’ve got a full-time job now at Knowle West Media Centre. I couldn’t make the living I needed being an innovative ‘out-there’ storyteller…but what I did for all those years does influence my full-time work. I started in theatre, but I guess I’ve never just done a mainstream thing. That might be my personality, just being sort of, I don’t know – different somehow, always questioning – but I also never made it into the mainstream, there’s always been a tension there…now I look on that as a positive thing. I worked in theatre, for many years, doing streetwork with The Natural Theatre Company of Bath. I should put you in touch with them, they’re doing a lot of really interesting stuff.
So I’d done theatre, done stage performance, run a company…but always sort of fringe in unusual places, doing unusual things. So with the street theatre it’s not juggling and fire-breathing, it’s moving around, promenading – quite similar to a lot of the online stuff that’s out there now, you’re suddenly appearing in people’s everyday lives as a character with a story to tell. And you’ve got to make them feel familiar enough, invited in, able to go on you with this weird unexpected adventure.
That’s similar to the word Kaleider uses quite often – interruptions – interrupting people’s lives with something.
Yes, and there are sorts of rules of engagement that borrow from but aren’t the same as theatre…often you’ll see somebody being ‘a character’ in street theatre and your immediate reaction is often ‘oh God, don’t talk to me, leave me alone’…so that work I did was more about allowing people to see you, walking by, keeping the space open, only engaging with people who are interesting – very similar to doing stuff online, where people haven’t bought a ticket, aren’t sitting down waiting for something to happen, and have to engage with a whole new set of rules that nevertheless make sense to them, and don’t ruin the mystery and adventure: we don’t know how long it will last, what we’re going to do, where we’re going to go. That’s what’s new about those new types of interaction. And making sure the audience feel safe and that you don’t break their contract. That’s where the interactivity of technology overlaps with gaming, for me. So I went from making theatre, making films for bands –
Did you train as a film-maker?
No. I was studying at Exeter College of Art and Design –it’s now part of Plymouth polytechnic or Plymouth academy or something. I did a degree in illustration, graphic design and print-making.
I’m interested in where people’s creative vocabularies are coming from – I’m aware that my process is informed through a particular machine in my brain that speaks ‘theatre’ and I need to get it to speak ‘technology’ as well, to learn that language…
A lot of it is about making use of whatever’s around you, so that’s the creative process. I’ve always worked in many different areas in performance, online, making short films – I really wanted to be a film director, control everything – then I was an actor too – doing a bit of everything. My first short won the British Amateur Video award, when making your own films with video cameras was a new thing. I couldn’t get in to the BBC, didn’t have any money – but I really wanted to reach audiences, entertain them, tell my stories, the same as any artist.
That sort of led later to me being involved with Watershed, and through the short films I’ve made getting to know people. And I’ve worked at Bristol Old Vic too, and in the Bristol music scene in the ‘90s with Portishead. Always experimenting, doing new things…what Clare Reddington is trying to do is give artists the opportunity to work with new technologies. I was always interested in telling stories however I could, with whatever seemed appropriate at the time. I did stop-frame animation too, putting things on the internet…
Did you have your own studio?
There was an animation studio in Bristol, they lent me some stuff – I taught myself how to animate, just made animations…I wanted to make a story about toys moving around. It was really about trying to find the most appropriate way to tell the story with the right emotional engagement. Then I became artist-in-residence at Hewlett Packard Labs, through an Arts Council funded scheme. I spent loads of time at HP labs looking at things like miniaturised RFID chips, looking at mobile phone platforms –
What does that mean, mobile phone platforms?
It’s what the technology within a phone can support – what it can do for you. This was before apps existed, so it was even the hardware, like the camera in a phone. They were playing with wearable technology, like spectacles with cameras on that could identify what you were looking at…so I often took prototypes that technologists had cast aside, but wanted to now see what other people – creative artists – could do with it, that was totally unexpected, and perhaps not what it was originally made for.
Is that how a lot of collaborations and crossovers occur: that there are technologists developing functional objects rather than art, and are then seeking new users, artists who can surprise them?
Yes, I think it’s so they can do some testing and exploring within a controlled environment. This is going back seven years or so, and even that was early days. Collaborations between HP Labs and artists in Bristol were about trying software out. I turned my six-month residency into a ten-month project where I made an enormous Alternate Reality Game. I’d been putting my films online and been doing some work in radio and theatre, spoke to a friend and said ‘I can’t get an audience, I can’t get into the BBC, I can’t seem to get an audience for my films – people online, how do I get hold of them?’.
My friend said there were forums online, who know, if you say ‘it’s started’ they will start looking for clues online, and will be able to follow this complex story – a proper narrative – using available free tools on the internet…but that can also make use of live interactions too like theatre. So that’s what I did with the HP labs residency. They were playing with GPS and looking at how you could access content whilst walking around. So I realised that at my fingertips, I had lots of new ways of putting stuff out there that didn’t have to be in one long linear chain…I did what a lot of novelists do, maybe writing the diary of a central character, her blog, letters from her relatives. Like Frankenstein, writing the epistolary novel – you can do that as well as having the film, or a timeline that exists in real time, like theatre – or even like TV where you know next week there’ll be a new episode, new content.
Structurally it sounds amazing, how to organise all of that. But when you say ‘hidden online’ what does that mean?
There’d be fake websites, fake blogs – a bit passé now – but disguising things as normal everyday things really: you’d drop clues in previous content and because they were super-geeks – forums of super-geeks who knew how to identify and follow extended stories…I mean it all started with Spielberg’s film A.I., where there were things hidden in the film credits, which led to a website, which then led to a whole other online story. They were marketing devices for movies, an international online crowd of super-geeks who love discovering things, who love the whole Star Trek long-form episodic narratives, who wanted to solve puzzles and crack codes online. It was making them work really, really hard, rather than sitting down in a chair and saying ‘right, entertain me’ it was about working with others and alone, online, for up to a month, really searching and looking.
Then we were able to do something here where it had a crescendo live in Bristol, and the users were suddenly able to see those characters, which was a kind of magical step-over from the experience of following a story, getting to love the character on the screen (they all had video blogs, all their own websites) and then suddenly they’ve stepped into reality. And because I worked with Natural Theatre Company, I brought those actors in and they were fantastic at doing these long-term improvisations in public. As a writer I was responding daily too, as the characters, emailing people or steering people towards clues – improvising as well as structuring and devising, the sort of stuff you’d do live, but live online. Those were the days when vehicles like Alternate Reality Games were only just coming out, but they’d all been funded by console games or film marketing and TV shows – mostly in the states – but mine was the only arts-funded Alternate Reality Game in the UK.
Then I also did one for the Star Trek movie, the 2009 JJ Abrahams movie. There’s a company in Bristol called Team Rubber, and they do viral movie campaigns online, mostly for Warner Bros. but all peripheral again, the outside and fringe. At that time the viral idea, online communities, was all new – marketing people were in denial: TV adverts, that was the way. This was only seven years ago. They didn’t trust it. But Rubber were doing that as a company, and many of their gigs came from Warner Bros., and in the UK they needed to spread the word out. And because JJ Abrams had directed Lost, all that complex long-term narrative stuff, he wanted something similar to help promote the movie.
Rubber got the budget, and Star Trek fans followed it and loved it. All the same sort of thing, emailing people as characters, interacting online, setting puzzles…anything to spin that bit of magic that would make it feel real. There was even a hole in the ground in the Oxfordshire countryside that we dug to stage an UFO crash site and people could say ‘Wow! Star Trek’s real!’ – you know, like when you have a child coming into the theatre and they touch the wizard’s hand and the wizard responds and says ‘oooh you’ve given me magic power’ and they’re delighted…that’s what entertainment and art should be about. Inviting them in, having them play along with you whilst you do it. And these big stories, these big global industries, they have an audience ready and waiting who know the rules.
A lot of this work comes from making one thing on the shoulders of something else, so as you say, there are established worlds, narrative rules, languages and structures…is it harder to have audiences invest when it’s something original?
I’m one of those people who…I’m not an artist who expects an audience to – I’m not didactic. I want to give them a head-start, I want them to have an emotional engagement. I don’t like art that’s difficult or cold or unfathomable. I’m more of an entertainer. So most of the work I do tends to be based on something they already know, to give them that head-start. That’s why I use science fiction a lot, because people tend to know what to expect.
Take Slingshot – who are down the road in the centre of Bristol – one of their main products is a zombie chase game, 2.8 Hours Later, which I wrote with them. We decided that the zombie thing was a really great way to get people to do something they’ve never done before, which is believe that they’re in a story, that it’s happening, and that they’re being chased around their own city running for their lives. For that to be thrilling and real enough because they know the rules of the zombie world. We know what zombies do: they eat your flesh, things are going wrong, you don’t want to get bitten or caught, you need to escape. It puts you in the role of the protagonist. It takes you from the passive – which is good too, it’s good to have part of that to put you in the context of the story – but what that work does is put you in the role. If you’ve seen enough films in this genre or read enough stories, you know what kind of character to play.
It is about role-playing but you’re playing yourself, in an extraordinary situation. It’s not so much like a video game where you see an avatar on screen and you’re controlling them, and you construct their personality – you’re you, alongside characters. They’ve done quite a few other things, and used mobile technology in the past, using GPS and sensors and that sort of thing – but with 2.8 Hours there’s no technology. We did have a fake radio station at one point, a guy broadcasting through the night saying ‘is there anybody out there!?’…but we took it back to the simple: theatre, street games, setting scenes. Technology should disappear.
But it’s interesting how it’s adopting familiar tropes that do exist in technology, i.e. first-person online gaming, video games, and then creates it at as a living thing…
Yes anything that puts you in that first-person role really.
So what’s the work you’re seeking to create that might make further use of technology – even if it disappears at the point of contact?
Well you can’t make money from stuff like alternate reality games now – you can’t make a profit because people expect them for free. You can’t get the numbers always, and you can’t replicate it. We try smaller experiments now, simple things that people can try out: sign on, turn up, do this – simple actions. Because of my theatre background I tend to think more about the physical environments that people move around in.
I can imagine Exeter holding stories in that way, that they might arrive with you in a walkabout through the city where things suddenly happen.
Do something really really simple. We did some stuff – me and Rik Lander – with the National Youth Theatre in Salford, and went through the same situation: what can we do that’s simple? We worked with our friend Duncan Speakman, and his thing – the ‘subtle mob’ – he would create an audio piece with beautiful writing, audio and music, a very moving and poetic listening experience: but designed to be listened to in a particular environment, with a group of people, all listening at exactly the same time.
Everyone’s listening to the same thing – or perhaps another group has something different – but he’s saying to you ‘I was on this street, I saw her…you see yourself reflected in the window’ – tricks of the teller that feel like magic, because they’re created to put you in that moment of (staged) serendipity. It’s a sort of beautiful ballet between being led and being the character.
They did a similar thing in The Memory Dealer, where you’re guided down the Harbourside in Bristol at the beginning, asked to imagine the first time you met the main character. I got on okay, but part of me found it a little bit arch: I couldn’t engage with it emotionally because I was being told things – how I felt about her, what I thought – and another part of me thought ‘well, you know I’m going to do this, so it ceases to be me in control.’ The bits that worked best gave me space to fill in the gaps, imagine around the information and genuinely make creative choices.
Duncan’s more masterful I think, in his application of those techniques. I hate doing stuff in the theatre, if I get picked on I just go ‘oh shit, really, me!?’. But Duncan’s works because there’s other humans that you’re relating to. There’s a moment when you have to dance and one part of you thinks ‘Oh My God’ but you’re kind of swept away by it, because you know how to be a hero and know how to be a loser in that situation – it’s cinematic in that way.
Slingshot also did something in Exeter – Jekyll 2.0 – where they used biotechnology, heat and movement sensors on people attached to computer software, where the narrative would respond to your heart-rate, body temperature, kinaesthetics…a door opens if your pulse races, or a window slams or light goes off if you walk around too much, or different audio plays…and something like Jekyll and Hyde is good because people know the basis of the story – a struggle between the inner and outer self – and you can be as literal as you like with it or not.
It’s a form of adaptation really.
For me, that’s my favourite thing. I do write original stories, short stories now. I used to plan big movie or theatre pieces but they’d never get done. So now I just write it as a short story, there they are, do what you will with them. The best thing is adapting because again, people say ‘ah I know this story, now I’m in it’ – they get what you’re trying to do.
The adaptive choices are as much to do with changing a virtual world into a physical – or an online user experience into an actual lived experience – as they are adapting form or content.
Often it’s taking something from an original that’s prominent – and making it a more successful adaptation because you’ve got that: rather than doing sequels, where you just replicate certain elements and forget what made the original – well, original. I think you have to be a genuine fan of whatever you’re adapting, otherwise you miss out what was joyful about it – that visceral quality.
Finally, can you direct me to one thing online that you think I should look at?
I think the 2.8 website is a good one to look at. That’s the work I’m most excited by at the moment.
Thanks Hazel.