Transmedia Narratives

CET helped support the Transmedia Narrative Interaction Research, a group of QUT faculty and graduate student researchers and writers led by QUT faculty member Dr. Donna Hancox, collaborating with the LAES program and other creative industries programs at Cal Poly, to develop a range of transmedia storytelling pieces for small and large-scale public performance. Dr. Hancox visited to field test the latest transmedia story project from PolyXpress in Pismo Beach.

Dr. Hancox also worked with students to further develop the Escape Room project which we hope to present on the Cal Poly campus with a live link to the QUT campus in Brisbane in early Spring 2015 in collaboration with the Theatre and Dance program and CET. The Escape Room project is a small room designed like a puzzle containing clues on how to unlock itself. Audiences are invited into the room, locked in, and then must work with one another to decipher the clues in the room to unlock the door and let themselves out. These rooms are usually connected to an elaborate, genre-based backstory and are popular with gamers and experimental theater groups in Asia and Eastern Europe. Escape room experience has been run recently in London, Paris, and New York City. Our goal is to create one of the first internationally-linked escape room experiences in the USA—one in Brisbane and one in San Luis Obispo. The room in Australia contains clues necessary for opening the room in the USA, and the room in the USA contains clues the room in Australia. We will development the backstory, the clue and room design with students and faculty at QUT and Cal Poly in Fall 2014 and Winter 2015, and will run these rooms as a theater experience in Spring 2015.