Beyond the Stage, in retrospect

Beyond the Stage was my project at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University for the Spring 2012 semester.

Beyond the Stage was one marathon of a project. Most team members remember that it didn’t go ideally, but I still remember it very fondly. I loved what our goal was supposed to be. Entertainment technology and the stage working together. In the end, it turned out that even without the problems that were out of our control, the project was completely overscoped from the start. Still, many great lessons were learned on the way.

From Powerbomb the game based on the Pulizer-nominated play by one of our clients, Kris Diaz, we had a crash experience-based course on tough game design and design documents. We learned a lot about how to make an interface clear and how to manage player expectations and allow them to master the gameplay.

For Lynn Nottage’s play, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, we made a story-driven website made for user-generated content where people who saw the play could contribute to the story. But for that we also needed seed content. To that end, me and Dana Shaw wrote four movie trailers for some imaginary movies Vera Stark appeared in based on a list of films she was in that was on her mock fan website. Dana picked her most famous movie, according to the story of the play, The Belle of New Orleans and, at Lynn Nottage’s suggestion, a B zombie film that was not on the list. Dana called it The Hoodoo Flu!. I settled for Swan Song, which I decided to make into a Douglas Sirk-like early 60s melodrama and Dream’s End, which I made into a Maltese Falcon-like film noir.

Writing the trailers was fun because I could put all the best plot points I could come up with and the most juicy situations of conflict without really having to thing about how they all fit together. I could use lines like “Don’t you understand that if we lose him now we lose everything?” That’s a good thing to have a character say if you can set it up. In a trailer, I didn’t in fact need to set it up. I also tried to make it in the style of the time, which looks a bit silly to a contemporary audience, but items to be posted on the website were supposed to look authentic, so historical accuracy was important.

I also wrote and edited (but did not film) our team promo video:

Special thanks to Evan Brown, Rayya Brown-Wright, Brad Buchanan, Josephine Tsay and the oh-so-unique-and-irreplaceable Dana Shaw for being the best team members I could ever have wished for.