“Unlocking the Secrets of Interactive Storytelling: Gavin Michael Booth Reveals How to Captivate Audiences in Episode 533 of SYS Podcast!”
Gavin Michael Booth
Yeah, it’s much easier to explain to people now that Adolescence on Netflix is blowing up. And Adolescence is a four-episode miniseries where each episode is a true single take. So all that means is when you hit record on the camera, you don’t stop until the movie is over and then you cut, there’s no hidden cuts. The actors, the camera crew have to do this just absolute dance of performing the entire movie in one go. Our movie differs a little bit because it’s split screen. So kind of like how I’m looking at you on Zoom right now, there were two camera crews in two different parts of a city filming simultaneously. And then the only editing in the movie is like putting those two sides together. But it deals with a man attempting to dial a suicide hotline and miss dials because he’s been drinking. And on the other end of the phone is a woman named Beth who’s a janitor at a college who isn’t, has no idea how to help him, isn’t a mental health expert, but just out of basic human kindness, decides to stay on the phone with Scott and figure and try to help him through what he’s going through. So it just becomes this sort of emotional, emotionally gripping tale of a woman trying to do her best to save this man’s life. And the idea of doing it in a single take and showing you both sides of it was to give the audience, it’s unflinching, you never get a pause, you never get relief of, oh, we’re fading out and now it’s the next day or a few hours later, you’re just in it with her that everything she says might be a trigger for him to hang up or take his own life and just sort of you’re in the tension, you’re in that rollercoaster for every unbroken moment. So we had to write the project really thinking about real time. Okay, well, it’s going to take him four minutes to walk from this bar to his apartment. And then at the elevator, doesn’t come right away. How do we do it? So, we have what we call the bit of an accordion script where either side could breathe a little bit and the actors knew that, okay, the phone is supposed to ring now because they’re actually acting live over the phone from their respective location. But if it doesn’t ring, you’re the janitor and you’re supposed to be finished mopping, but go to task B, there were sort of like multiple threads at different points in the script, just so that if something went off timing on one side or the other, we didn’t have to cut and reset. It would just kind of could keep flowing organically. We didn’t want to have the situation where somebody would just end up in like video game resting position, just like waiting for the next line.
