Contract | Feb – April 2023 | 20hrs @ $50/hr | Apply by Feb 19th 2023
Story City is looking for a Canadian writer to join our development team for an interactive storytelling project.
The writer will initially (Feb-April) across 20hrs develop an outline for three fictional, interactive stories that are meant to be experienced in physical locations across a city, aimed at a youth or family audience. With the hope that grant funding will then allow for a second contract with the writer (June-Dec 2023) to write the scripts for the concepts they outline in this initial phase.
ABOUT STORY CITY & THE PROJECT
Why go for another walk when you can be a private investigator? Or complete a secret spy mission? At Story City you get to be the hero, you get to choose your adventure. Story City is a platform that allows creators to make interactive stories that only open in the right location in a city using our GPS app. Think Pokemon Go but for film, audio, theatre, or books.
Story City as a studio has previously produced over 60 stories for 9 different cities, however, these stories were customized for a specific city, meaning you must travel to that city for an experience as the stories use locations only found in that city. These new stories to be developed will use more general locations (eg. a city hall vs. Edmonton’s City Hall) leveraging the learnings from previous creations to make portable stories that can be placed in any city, not just a specific one.
THE STORIES YOU’LL BE WORKING ON
The chosen writer will be working on the following types of interactive stories, with the suggestions for the storyline being provided as a guide for the tone and types of genres we’re looking into for this project:
- Escape Room style puzzle trail: You find an ancient map in your local library that points towards buried treasure in the city. Can you find it before other, more nefarious parties get there first? A 60-minute experience aimed at families with kids ages 10-17yrs. Two puzzle sets are planned, one for adults, another for children to allow for enjoyment for both age groups. Puzzles include a series of logic puzzles, and physical challenges/tasks that then unlock the next location. This will take place in common locations in a park (playground, covered picnic area, creek or lake, park bench, garden, trees).
- Immersive video experience: A 6-location experience involving on-screen character pieces forming a series of clues to unlock to solve a murder in your town. This is our first experiment in building a film-based, locative experience. An influential politician on the cusp of getting health reforms passed has ended up dead. Can you prove this was a murder most foul rather than the suicide it appears? This concept leverages the popular genre trend of fictionalizing a ‘true-crime’ murder mystery, ala Only Murders in the Building.
- Choose your adventure: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to determine why the adults in your city have started to act so strangely. Is it aliens? Have they been brainwashed? You will need to use your rigorous spy training to get to the bottom of this mystery. A 60-minute experience aimed at families. Visuals are cartoonish, audio is only 3 minutes in length at each stop, tone is comedic spy mission. This will take place in common locations in a botanic garden or park.
EXPERIENCE, DETAILS & APPLICATION
While games writing/narrative design experience is a plus, we are mainly looking for someone who also has a skillset in writing for theatre or film (particularly considering the film concept we’d like to develop). At this time we can only work with Canadian citizens or PR holders.
Please include a cover letter/email on why you’re interested in the project, your CV (PDF) and 5-page sample of your previous work (PDF) which you think would most match the style of the stories we’re looking to develop with you.
The initial contract is for 20hrs to develop outlines for the above three concepts, these concepts will then be used to secure prototype funding for the development of full scripts for each piece in the second half of this year.
Please send your application package to info@storycity.app by EOD Feb 19th 2023.
We will be conducting calls with our short-listed applications in the week of Feb 20th (which will occur between 10am-5pm) and make a final decision by March 3rd.
Tip: We highly recommend downloading the Story City app, turning on Spoiler Mode, and familiarising yourself with some of the stories on the app (such as The Coronet Caper, Tips from your Barista, Agent 82, The Adelaide Time Travel Caper) to give you an idea of the types of content Story City houses.