Kath Dooley – författare

This handbook is an essential creative, critical and practical guide for students and educators of screen production internationally. It covers all aspects of screen production—from conceptualizing ideas and developing them, to realizing and then distributing them—across all forms and formats, including fiction and non-fiction for cinema, television, gallery spaces and the web. With chapters by practitioners, scholars and educators from around the world, the book provides a comprehensive collection of approaches for those studying and teaching the development and production of screen content. With college and university students in mind, the volume purposely combines theory and practice to offer a critically informed and intellectually rich guide to screen production, shaped by the needs of those working in education environments where ‘doing’ and ‘thinking’ must co-exist. The Palgrave Handbook of Screen Production fills an important gap in creative-critical knowledge of screen production, while also providing practical tools and approaches for future practitioners.

With reference to traditional film theory and frameworks drawn from fields such as screenwriting studies and anthropology, this book explores the challenges and opportunities for both practitioners and viewers offered by the 360-degree storytelling form. It focuses on cinematic virtual reality (CVR), a format that involves immersive, high quality, live action or computer-generated imagery (CGI) that can be viewed through head mounted display (HMD) goggles or via online platforms such as YouTube. This format has surged in popularity in recent years due to the release of affordable high quality omnidirectional (360-degree) cameras and consumer grade HMDs. The book interrogates four key concepts for this emerging medium: immersion, presence, embodiment and proximity through an analysis of innovative case studies and with reference to practitioner interviews. In doing so, it highlights the specificity of the format and provides a critical account of practitioner approaches to the concept development, writing and realisation of short narrative CVR works. The book concludes with an account of the author’s practice-led research into the form, providing a valuable example of creative practice in the field of immersive media.

This book is focused on screenwriting and development for virtual reality (VR). It explores a diverse range of creative approaches to the writing and screen development of VR stories and immersive audience experiences. Contributions from scholars and practitioners combine conceptual and practically orientated approaches for creating fictional and documentary media VR stories. The book evaluates, challenges and adapts existing screenwriting models and practices for immersive storytelling and grapples with the future of storytelling in the era of sophisticated computer visualization, AI and the online social metaverse. The book proposes new VR storytelling models, identifies altered relationships between creators, screen works and their audiences and demonstrates how interdisciplinary practices will be core to the future of screen storytelling.

This monograph delves into recent evolutions in virtual reality (VR) storytelling, focusing on entertainment-based works created or launched since 2020. Through various case studies, it showcases the increasing diversity and sophistication of recent narrative-based projects. Moving past the initial hype associated with the latest wave of VR, a number of innovative and affective works combining documentary-based or fictional storytelling with game mechanics, live theatre and other elements, have appeared at festivals or on distribution platforms in recent years. These interdisciplinary works have much to tell us about the future of VR storytelling but have yet to receive sustained analysis. This book aims to correct that. 

Dooley argues that VR, as an interactive medium that places the user inside a storyworld in a visible or invisible virtual body, offers narratives that incorporate the user’s body as a storytelling tool. This fosters user-centred stories that unfold in three-dimensional space. Adopting phenomenological and formal analysis methodologies, the monograph examines case studies through their approaches to narrative, style, and interactive devices. Key concepts that are explored include agency, direct address, environmental and spatial storytelling, embodiment and presence. By providing a much-needed analysis of works through a variety of theoretical lenses, the book illustrates how recent VR storytelling fosters powerfully transformative experiences.