We’ve been finding out a lot about the stories surrounding Corby and steel working in the UK, but the time has finally come for us to start forging how our story is going to look. At the heart of everything we do at MBD is storytelling, whether it's our story or somebody else's, we are passionate about bringing our audiences on a journey. With this project, it’s really important that the voices of Corby are what is front and centre. We’ve captured some amazing stories through our interviews and really want them to shine in the final VR experience.
With this in mind, we now have to stitch together snippets of our recorded interviews into a cohesive narrative that will allow the audience to come along on the journey, whether they’ve lived in Corby all their lives, or if this is their first experience hearing about this little Northamptonshire town. Since the inception of the project we’ve had an idea of how we want to structure the final experience, starting with the origins of Corby and touching on the Viking history and founding of the town. We then wanted to put the audience in the shoes of a steel worker and help them imagine what it would have been like standing in a steel works and, more importantly, what does everything do. Obviously the story of the steel works in Corby can’t shy away from the closures and the mass loss of jobs, but through immersing ourselves in this place and its people, we want to finish off with the hopeful tone that is present whenever you talk to the people about the place they live.
Keeping this rough three act structure in our mind, we now scour through the interviews to find snippets of what the people have said that will feed into the story. Luckily we need to be listening and cataloguing the interviews for inclusion in the audio archive (more on that in a future blog), so it's two birds with one stone!
Over a number of weeks we slowly start to tease out audio snippets that work well together. However, just putting interview excerpts together isn’t going to tell the whole story. We’re still going to need a narrator to add context and help breach the gap between different peoples parts of the same story. Our aim is to say as little as we can and let the interviews stand on their own, so we take an iterative approach. Adding narration between two audio clips. Taking it out. Adding in new audio clips and moving the existing ones around. Just like the process of removing impurities from molten steel, we refine and work on the script until we have something we are happy with. Of course, this is just the first draft of the script, as we progress through there will be necessary rewrites and tweaks, but we’re very happy with where we are and excited to take the next steps.
We have the cast of our experience. Now to smelt all the research we’ve captured so far and begin the forging process!