Susie Farmbrough
MA Graphic Design and Art Direction
This work is concerned with collaborative storytelling. There are many ways people come together to create stories, such as online forums and table-top games. These projects aim to visualise and explore these stories, as well as provide a feeling of what participating in creating these narratives is like. They explore the feeling of putting your trust in someone else to handle your work and how two people can find different interpretations of the same sentence.
“Losing Control” was the first comic to be created. The activity involved four writers who had never worked together writing a page of a story each. The writers were only able to read the page immediately preceding theirs, resulting in a free falling narrative.
“Drawn Downstairs” is the product of an online role-play between three people. They took turns to create the story together as a character each, before formulating the story they remembered as a comic script.
“The King” is a comic involving 15 different writers, with the same activity as “Losing Control” but with many branches, resulting in several unique endings.