DRAMAPPING
“Dramapping”
Writing long-form stories for the screen is a demanding creative activity involving peculiar forms of collaborative rituals and tools. Screenplays are communication platforms interfacing the creative and organisational input of writers, directors, editors, actors, producers, designers and many many others. Even if initially generated by a single mind, they end up being reiterated by dozens of interventions at differently crucial moments of the conception and realisation process.
Feature movies generally deploy their dramaturgical arches over ninety to hundred-twenty minutes. Television and streaming platforms stretch fictional environments over several seasons, staging plots and character arches over vast temporal and spatial canvases. Shorter online formats do the same over a few minutes and sometimes seconds. Every scale brings in a different challenge, but all of them deal with world building. Such different scales render the organisation of conception processes all the more intricate, especially if they involve multiple writers and creative teams often pressured by time and budget. The early ideas behind “dramapping” came out of screenwriting projects needing complex orchestrations between plot, characters, environments and thematic threads. It also involves a smooth coordination of all those involved.
The ability to structure characters and interactions as to make adjustments possible is key to the screenwriting process. “Writing is re-writing”, this is indeed also true for the screen. Screenplays demand peculiar iteration strategies connecting fragments, parts and wholes in multidimensional manners, and distribute tasks in larger teams of interacting creative agents. For this, authors develop tricks of all sorts. The toolsets prototyped in this project attempt to weave different sites of interaction between characters, places, things and themes; - and help the creatives who develop/iterate them find their way around these intricate entanglements.
They offer multiple viewing modes allowing writers to model complex sets of relationships and oversee their evolution in a manageable manner. The narrative maps thus created help control and evaluate modifications in a holistic manner. Small changes in one scene may trigger cascading changes on several scales, sometimes affecting architectural dynamics such as plot or character development arches, or much more “microscopic" elements such as character features, dialogues, locations, and props scattered across the whole storyline. Other changes may involve denotative and connotative layers in the meaning-making potential of a character, scene, location etc. The ability to define complex dynamic relationships allows one to visualize what is going on to whom, when, where and why.
Plot/Drama/world Narrative modulation.
Next to the storyworld´s management, the “dramapping” approach involves the possibility to separate “world-building”, dramaturgical organization, and narrative modulation through multiple p.o.vs, focus and sequential plot-organizational nodes. This may allow co-writers to extract multiple experiential perspectives out of the same “happening”, and toggle shift between them to construct alternative narrative renderings of the same basic plot point. What to make of friends and enemies, alliances and antagonisms, self and others when the stage of our stories become complex entanglements between macro and micro scales, individuals, species and environments, structures and agencies?
Screenplays are tools. Their structure and procedures codetermine what is happening. They are needed to “manage” the distribution of information across the narrative and affective canvas of a story, and to interface between different teams of creatives needing to collaborate on set: writers, producers, directors, actors, casting directors, a.o. In its current state, the project has developed several modular elements facilitating the ideation, development, and formalization of project-nodes overseeing character development, thematic threading and overall plot construction. The project is under development since 2012, integrating insights gathered during the experimental production of multiple screenplays as case studies, and currently exploring LLM potential to facilitate some organisational tasks and assist individual and group creativity.