Thesis
My graduate thesis at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) explored the experimental nature of collaborative storytelling and how improvised stories can be adapted for television animation.
I ran several storytelling experiments in the form of sessions of Dungeons and Dragons and documented the outcomes while they happened. Below are the three outcomes I chose to storyboard and their descriptions.
All three outcomes had identical endings because of the way I structured the roleplaying sessions, but there was a lot of variety in what the players did to get there each time. Honestly, the most interesting part of this thesis was seeing how different people interacted with the same story in such different ways that all lead to the same conclusion.
The first outcome of my collaborative story had a short introduction to the story’s setting followed by a fight with the main villain of the game. It was a straightforward improvisation session where my players mostly listed to some exposition and then had a fight with what would be one of the first villain of the much larger story.
The second outcome I chose to storyboard features a theme that popped up in most of my storytelling experiments. I don’t know if it was because of the time of day I typically scheduled the session or if I was just starving my players, but it seemed that everyone that played through this story wanted their characters to eat during the game.
Because of this, the players in this outcome uncovered a village that would be letter in future storytelling sessions, and they had a nice meal before realizing they were running late for their meeting at the castle. From there, they got to the fight with the main villain.
The last outcome was probably my favorite out of all of them because my players were able to uncover one of the most important elements of the plot I had planned for the future. They realized that all of the castle’s workers had eye tattoos on their wrists. They didn’t uncover what it meant in the first short session, but it lead to them being interested in the future plot.
Below is the video presentation of some of my boards. Because of the pandemic, I had to voice all of the characters in my final thesis myself, but I believe it was able to demonstrate the ideas written about in my paper.