Journal of Screenwriting - Virtual Reality: Exploring Technologies, Practices and Paradigms, Dec 2023

In this article, we present two related approaches to scripting or prototyping VR narratives. We tested storyboarding and pilot production techniques with 40 students over two years, and they were tasked with creating documentary VR narratives characterized by embodied moods and experiences. The aim was to help students tailor a strong first-person viewer relationship with the virtual environment utilizing the ways the body can be centred in story worlds. In particular, the article deals with character positioning and point of view-writing in the first-person, drawing on insights from human–computer interaction (HCI) and postphenomenology. There is an ongoing exploration of new experimental approaches to story world production for immersive media, and prototyping processes from fields such as HCI are becoming increasingly relevant for screenwriters. We provide analyses of how storyboards and pilot productions can situate the user in relation to the virtual environment. Based on the analyses, we evaluate the use value of such prototyping for students and practitioners who need to make first-person viewer positions for VR narratives, and we compare our approach with similar pedagogical projects as represented in the literature.

This article explores the challenges and emerging understandings around crafting the narrative position of the participant in real-time virtual reality (VR). Drawing on interviews with contemporary VR creators working in the United Kingdom, America, Canada and Australia, the article explores the ways in which creators conceptualize the narrative space occupied by an interactive VR participant. It argues that contemporary creators are utilizing the narrative capacity of the participant in ways that challenge traditional notions of characterization and protagonist. Instead, creators engage methods and ideas that are more aligned with the notion of ‘postdramatic’ theatre. I propose that the concept of negative space can be used to explain the relationship between the active participant and authored VR work. Conceiving the space occupied by the embodied participant in terms of ‘negative space’ within the authored environment can allow screenwriters and VR creators to ‘write around’ this absent (but present) participant during the development process.

While virtual reality technologies have been developing since the 1960s in North America, they became broadly accessible for the public in 2016, with the launch of affordable virtual reality headsets in the global market. Amongst recent virtual reality works, 360-degree films are particularly popular. With this article, I study the evolution of writing for 360-degree films from 2016 to 2020 through the analysis of the 360-degree documentary series Abitibi360 created by Canadian filmmaker Serge Bordeleau, of which Season 1 was produced in 2017 and Season 2 followed in 2020. My goal is to determine how his writing processes changed over this time period and to highlight the various factors that influenced this change. To conduct this research, I present an analysis of creative documents produced by Bordeleau for the two seasons. This work will demonstrate how the author evolved to use virtual reality technologies to develop his own language, even though he continued to be influenced by his original medium: cinematographic documentary films. Bordeleau became more creative as he mastered the techniques of virtual reality production. In particular, he learned to guide the viewer’s attention to chosen points of interest within the 360-degree image by using several techniques, such as light, movement, colour and noise.

Over the last decade cinematic virtual reality (CVR) has been progressively developing as a meaningful vehicle for impactful and immersive narratives. Recent studies of CVR concepts and components have laid the ground for a CVR narrative theoretical framework that might assist researchers and practitioners to understand this type of virtual reality (VR) experience. While existing studies have isolated key features of CVR, a range of projects from different fields of work or in different stages of production have utilized a range of different screenwriting processes and strategies to address the affordances of this medium. In this article we seek to systematize the key findings of earlier studies into a narrative framework for CVR and to analyse how this framework is reflected in existent models and templates for writing a screenplay for CVR experiences. Furthermore, and based on this narrative framework, we also aim to contribute an exploratory approach to CVR screenwriting by proposing a variative and original screenwriting template. This template addresses the main limitations of the existent screenwriting templates and formats that we analyse in this study while also summoning the main advantages.

Review of: Do the Right Thing: Storytelling Secrets of Five Screenplays That Embrace Diversity, Karla Fuller (2023)

Studio City, CA: Michael Weise Productions, 112 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-61593-340-2, p/bk, USD 26.95

Review of: Alternative Scriptwriting: Contemporary Storytelling for the Screen, Ken Dancyger, Jessie Keyt and Jeff Rush (2023), 6th ed.

Abingdon: Routledge and Focal Press, 442 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-03215-056-7, p/bk, GBP 31.49