“Unlocking the Secrets of Interactive Storytelling: Gavin Michael Booth Reveals How to Captivate Audiences in Episode 533 of SYS Podcast!”
Ashley
Huh. That’s fascinating. So where did this idea come from?
Gavin Michael Booth
So William Shevery and Joseph Aveeno, William is the owner of the reveal platform. And he came to me, he had seen a project I did for Blumhouse that had a little bit of interactivity and was a little bit outside the box and said, hey, this is about going back four or five years ago. I have this core idea of reward, an interactive murder mystery where somebody can win, win the prize by playing detective at home. Would you be interested, say no more. So, he’s sort of been developing it on and off over all that time period. And I’ve written a completely different story with my friend, Ryan Murphy, not that Ryan Murphy, other Ryan Murphy. Not the American Horror Story. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I wish, yes. Sorry, Ryan, I love you, but yeah. And that didn’t work out at the time. It’s been through a couple of different iterations and then eventually settled on this idea of, I made a living for years shooting music videos and shooting tour videos for bands and kind of getting the experience of being around musicians in the studio and they’re dealing with record labels. I’m like, oh, what about a murder set in the seedy underground of the pop music business? And that sprung open the idea. So, it’s drawing from a lot of situations. I don’t know anybody who’s been murdered over their record deal, but it’s just pulling from all the things that I see on the dark side of entertainment. And a good friend of mine, Blue is a pop songwriter and producer, so he wrote original music for us and our actors could sing. It was just sort of the perfect alignment of, oh, I can play in a world that I love. I can write something that I know very well. And it gave a lot of just interesting, any murder mystery you need interesting suspects and enough interesting background on each of the suspects to keep the audiences guessing. And this was just the story that aligned. But a difficult project to write because you’re writing the traditional narrative TV show that has to serve as entertainment for somebody who wants to watch it and not do the contest side of things, but also building the larger world of all of this online element and further backstory and elements that you can find online, this whole sort of second screen experience that elevates the storytelling as well as just being a clue that you can find, but doesn’t take away from the story if somebody only watches the TV show and doesn’t go explore all of the rest. So, it’s been a bit of a dance and it’s still a learning curve even week to week as we’re putting episodes out. I’m still finding ways to adjust and alter and make things better as we go.
