Web-narrative laboratory 2023
A semester-long course for bachelor's in TV and New Media speciality at Ural Federal University in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
The course was prepared and led by Andrey Chugunov.
Participants:
Third-year bachelors of the TV and New Media speciality.
Description:
The course consisted of 5 lectures and 11 practical classes. There were 6 students on the course.

The lecture block touched on the evolution of media and how they have shaped the ways of storytelling. Students familiarized themselves with how narrative has occurred in literature, cinema, computer games, and art. The course included 2 guest lectures: poet and writer Egana Djabbarova told students about how narrative is constructed in literature and poetry; Sergey Panasenkov, screenwriter and creative producer at Good Story Media, explained how scripts are created for movie production.

The central focus of the course was to create an interactive narrative based on a website. We took an in-depth look at how Net-art artists approach this task.
We have reviewed and analyzed the works of such pillars of net art as Olia Lialina, JODI, Martine Neddam, Rafaël Rozendaal, etc. We also studied the phenomenon and aesthetics of Russian punk journalism of the 2010s.

During the practical sessions, we looked at how to work with step-by-step animations and scripts in Tilda, as well as exploring the node programming environment cables.gl, which allows you to create 2D and 3D scenes for web pages. The assignment asked students to tell a story from their lives by weaving interactive mechanics into the web-based narrative.
Web-narratives:
Short description of projects:

1) Maria Manokhina - The fear of the shield and spear
"Diary entries about personal experiences of living in a patriarchal society. The main screen is a diary describing the chaos of thoughts about my feelings in society, my body, and my appearance as a girl.
The composition is non-linear; there is a main page and others, you can go to them in any order and it will not affect the understanding of the idea.
This emphasizes the diary information transmission method, as personal diaries do not always have a clear plot or a sequence of text parts. This site is a flow, a chaos of thoughts that builds into one general idea.
Visual: the aesthetics of early internet art, homemade children's diaries.
The weirder and cringier it looks, the better".

2) Roman Akhlustin - Soulmates
"A story about soulmetry and how you can meet the exact people who become special. In my narrative, I want to show you how my mind personally holds memories and feelings for the people I'm going to tell you about. Specifically, it's Dasha and Alina, who hold a huge place in my life. and my heart.
- I'd like each block to always lead the reader back to the same starting page with a picture,
- A chaotic narrative".

3) Diana Urbatis - Depression
" How often do creative people suffer from depression? A story about how and what I feel like on days of losing interest in all things and withdrawing from others".

4) Maria Sergeeva - Time of the Dead?
"It's not exactly a life story, but it's also misleading to call it someone else's story in the context of my situation. I work in scary quests, and this story is one of them. You have a rule - the actors play from themselves. From their feelings, worldviews, experiences and so on.
The plot of the quest is about a crazy girl with an unknown mental illness. She starts to see her brother, who doesn't really exist. Her parents cannot cure the girl and try to bring her back to reality, but all in vain. Now this house is changing in the way Marie wants it to be. In one of their breakups they kill her parents, but she forgets about it and for her they just went on vacation. However, there is an unchanging part of her world, her brother, who she searches around the house every day. One day some unknown men wander into her home, whom Marie greeted warmly and asked for help in finding her brother.
Marie Kennedy is just a name to put in front of visitors. That I'm crazy and looking for my brother is just something I have to believe. That's the end of the script, the rest of the story was created by myself over the course of two years".