Michael Keerdo-Dawson

Tallinn University, Estonia

Interactivity and Anti-drama: Conscious and unconscious narrative strategies in the story development process for The Limits of Consent

This paper elucidates a tension between a screenwriter’s creative impulses to
conform to or rebel against dramatic narrative conventions. This artistic research, using
screenwriting as a mode of creative enquiry, examines the effect of interactivity on the story
development process of an otherwise traditional linear film. When interactivity is applied as
a deliberate narrative strategy, the film must accommodate multiple trajectories due to the
unfixing of the totality of the film as a set sequence of scenes. In the unfixing it enacts,
interactivity becomes a propagator of complexity which forces the writer-director to seek
out different narrative possibilities. The Limits of Consent (2022) is the major creative output
of this artistic research; a psychological drama that employs a branching narrative which
leads the audience to different endings (nine in total) depending on the choices they make
at key intervals. The development of the film’s story over a three-year period involved many
iterations, from the initial outline to various drafts of the screenplay, to multiple edits of the
film. At every stage of the screenwriting and later editing process, the inclusion of the nonlinear device—interactivity—forced me, the film’s writer-director, to employ compensatory
moves in order to solve resultant story problems. The compensatory moves which
interactivity brought about most often involved my embracement of anti-drama (i.e. any
screenwriting choice which is in opposition to dramatic conventions). I embraced anti-drama
as an unconscious narrative strategy to preserve the drama that the film sets up in its
opening linear sequence. This choice highlighted and then reconciled my contradictory
desire to entertain the audience and experiment with the form. Interactivity allowed for the
twin pursuit of these desires and consequently encouraged me to explore anti-dramatic
trajectories more meaningfully and, crucially, without the kind of fear that can undermine
experimental ambitions.

Michael Keerdo-Dawson is an Estonia-based lecturer and artistic researcher at the Baltic
Film, Media and Arts School (BFM) with a specialism in experimental approaches to
screenwriting, storytelling, and film production. He is currently a PhD candidate due to
defend his thesis on interactive filmmaking this spring; he has published articles in the
journals Studies in Eastern European Cinema and the Interactive Film & Media Journal.
Michael also has a decade of experience in the British film and television industry for the
UK’s largest public broadcaster, ITV. During that time he also worked as an independent
filmmaker. He has written and directed a number of short and feature films selected for
prestigious film festivals including Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival and FrightFest. His latest
project is a film co-production with Australia which explores screenwriting and film
production through extended character-development workshops and the use of deliberately
entangled production phases.