Story World Design – Reflections on World–Building Method

Story Worlds are usually thought of as fictional worlds associated with fantastic genres as fantasy, science fiction, super-hero adventure, horror or fairy tales often delivered through trans-media channels. In reality most artwork or at least artworks with any affiliation to narration from painting, poetry and photoplays suggests fictional or non-fictional diegetic worlds. When it comes to story world building this can either be perceived as an activity in the mind of the “reader” or real-life activities by fans extending popular fiction through fan art, fan fiction, role play and cosplay. From a production point of view story world building and design are often affiliated with the usage of new digital pre-visualization and virtual production technologies in big scale media productions.
This paper discusses how methods of story world building or design as an approach towards content development in the context of visual media however still needs to be mapped and tested. Traditionally, film and visual media production is perceived as a process where content is written to be prepared for shooting and finally edited. Though every production forms its owe structure the general concept or metaphor is the assembly line moving content through the different faces from pre-production to post-production. When working in world building, the waterfall approach of traditional film and media production is challenged by development methods of neighbouring media such as video games and theatre benefiting from open iterative approaches, co-creation and devising. This paper draws upon a series of workshops conducted at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design and The National Danish Film School, which were designed to collect knowledge on story world building methods for creative development of format free of media agnostic content.