The NoW - v1
Looking back at the first performance of The NoW and how this has shaped the ground-breaking social entertainment app we are building.
I think now is a good time to reflect on the first performance of The NoW, especially as we’re starting to work properly on the new app. This app has come out of what we did with the first performance, so it feels like the right time to look back at what we did, what we learned, and how it’s all connected.
I wrote the original The NoW because I was tired of the typical stories in Hollywood about aliens arriving, us having a big war with them, and somehow always winning. If aliens do arrive, I’d like to think it could be a much better experience. I also wanted to write a story that was more about bringing people together, focusing on life, love, and understanding instead of division, defence, and fear.
I also watched a lot of documentaries and YouTube videos that inspired me, and all of them taken together shaped the foundation of the alien society within the NoW story.
As well as the story being something different, I wanted my approach to telling the story to be different too. Initially I thought about serialising it in a Facebook group. And I looked at Wattpad and Medium, and other blog sites - but I don’t like how they all work on opaque algorithms. And I really wanted to do something very different - different from writing.
I wanted it to feel more real, like an actual experience.
I thought about Murasaki Shikibu, the woman who created the fist novel. How Charles Dickens serialised his stories using the printing press, and created publishing as we know it. And how Orson Welles revolutionised radio with his performance of War of the Worlds. Incidentally, War of the Worlds was the first story of alien arrival, war, win - and it shaped all others since. And my story was an intentional about face on that. So I wanted my story telling approach to be equal too.
So, instead of a printing press, or serialising on social media, just like on a printing press. I decided to innovate, I decided to perform the story in a Facebook group, treating it like a real-life event. In the beginning, I considered playing all the characters myself (by using pages), but I am glad I didn’t - It was a lot of work, and I didn’t realise how much effort it would take even with actors.
I spent 18 months creating a plan of posts and a set of image and video assets, working with creators around the globe. And then I found some actors to help me perform it. It went really well from a performance point of view. It was a low-budget, trial run, but it worked, and I really enjoyed it, and so did others. And the audience enjoyed it too.
The main problem was Facebook’s algorithms. Sometimes people didn’t see the posts, or they didn’t show up in the right order, which made it hard to tell the story properly. That’s when the idea for the app started to form, though it took me a while to realise that.
Then, some personal issues came up. Due to external factors, including problems with my family and my own mental health, I had a breakdown toward the end. I lost touch with some people, and it became hard to stay connected to the project.
Around about the same time, and for some time after, Facebook began to repeatedly find issues with my account, with the group, with the posts in the group, and with accounts of some of the performers. It became so difficult to use, I had to create a new account.
You can see some additional information about the first performance of The NoW, and you can see some of the story - but there is missing content and posts as a result of Facebook’s random rules and confusing support systems.
But during that difficult time, I came across Jerome Bruner’s studies on how stories can influence people, and I remembered something one of the original "NoW" participants, Stephanie Dean, had said to me after the show was over. She suggested that the way I’d created a story could be used to help people work through their emotions, almost like a virtual escape room. I thought about that a lot, and when I connected it to what Bruner was saying, the purpose of the app started to come together.
And it’s so nice to know that the app we’re building now came out of all of that history and experience.
It's very simple in terms of the social media elements; it will have a chronological feed and it won’t use your data for anything. Plus, it will be built with advanced accessibility standards from the ground up, to welcome all kinds of people. It's not traditional social media in that respect. It’s a place to engage socially in stories - social entertainment.
And in terms of the content creation side of the app, it’s going to provide a level playing field for storytellers and performers to engage audiences globally and earn from their productions, without having to enter the difficult TV and Film production markets.
It's a fictional story-building app that's currently being funded by a grant from the UK government and built by a team of expert developers. I'm really excited to see where it goes.
Read more about it here:
Is it Digital Theatre, or what?!
After my post the other week about The NoW trial performance, and how that created everything about the app we are developing now, I wanted to talk more about the Digital Theatre App.
And you can find out more about our projects on our website - https://www.feathertreearts.com/