Paper Houses

Logline

Paper Houses tells the lives of five individuals whose lives collide on one life shattering night to face their own personal disasters.

Statement

The storytelling experience exposes what we may think others are going through but we are never fully able to get the whole story until we listen. The five lives that intertwine on one fateful night helps to undercover the true struggles in their lives brought on by a catalyst of an earth shattering moment. Much to my own dismay, I realized that the narrative captures a dialogue that is so ordinarily relatable by touching themes like loss, love, passion and the overall meaning of happiness. The source, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain by Barney Norris, sets up a lot of the story — however, I decided to focus in on how the narrative can be controlled to explain the story in a such a way that images complete the characters sentences to truly give a new definition of what it means to listen.

Background | Inspiration

I grew up in a small town much like Salisbury. In small towns, it is easy for each one of us to judge and characterize someone without truly knowing the whole story. We judge off of the image and rumors that are spread; We decide if someone is good or bad based on heard actions; We lose ourselves in our predisposition and forget to empathize with our neighbors. As chatter sparks around small communities, the fire that sets ablaze are usually the false assumptions. Paper Houses aims to break down the walls and remind ourselves to think that there is much more going on from what the eye can see.

Story

Paper Houses is sourced from Barney Norris’s novel, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain. The novel explains the intertwining of fives lives that all happen to be at the same place, same time during a catastrophic accident. All five lives has lost or is losing something in their life, however, one of them loses it on that fateful night. A flower seller, a boy, an old farmer, an army wife and a security guard experience the same event. Each voice is needed as the narrator of the story to fill in what is lost because they all have blindness to the situation due to their personal struggles external to the accident that brought them together.

Rita, the flower seller, struggles with a downward spiral of crime while young Sam is navigating first love while he is losing the biggest love, his father, to cancer. Meanwhile, George the old sweet farmer manages just losing his wife of 50 years while he is being interrogated for the accident. Alison, lonely army wife, writes to her journal to recount the happenings while eluding to her pill and alcohol addiction to cope with paranoia of her husband dying in war. Last, Liam, the young man, who observes the other four lives from afar is dealing with his meaning of life.

Although Norris gives us the deep dive into each of their lives, Paper Houses does not explicitly expose the story; rather it is alluding to the struggles of each individual making the participant listen closely to both the audio and visual cues of the experience. Some lives are more realized than others but that is meant to represent how open and honest the characters are not for the observer but for themselves.

Fabrication and Materiality

I really focused on how this piece would be told through the physical experience because the visual exposition would play a large part into helping complete the key elements of the character narratives. Paper Houses initially drew physical appearance inspiration form this quote:

“Buildings are not beautiful because of their shapes or patterns, the bricks or stones that make them. What are transfixing are the ideas and dreaming and longing they encase. They stand as memorials to the lives of the people who made them, who raised the money to raise the walls, who buried the men who fell from the scaffolding.”

I decided to create the environment that the story takes place by representing each character through a paper house. The materiality of the concept was really important to the meaning of the story. Growing up in a small town, it was always the not so funny joke the community thinks they know everyone’s business. The paper thin walls are suppose to play on this idea, that we think we can hear everything going on behind them. Another reason for using paper was that it also represents the fragility of life. In the matter of seconds, life can be ripped from us and torn into a thousand little pieces. Furthermore, the material, from its lightness, gave me the ability to hang from the ceiling to releasing light through and through to create a beautiful shadowing effect for the environment.

Then I decided to add to the story by sourcing photographs from instagram of Salisbury to allow the audience to truly grasp the community. Through the immerse experience, they can feel more apart of the situation they are being placed in. Furthermore, the images allow to allude to what each narrator has lost without the audio explicitly stating it. Reason for cutting out faces are not trying to give a sense of importance but more to draw attention and mystery of the faceless individual.

Paper Houses: An Multi-sensory Experience

From the sketch above, I originally wanted to create the experience where when the user was close to the house the narrator’s story would start through the speakers. However due to time, I decided to show this experience through a video that provides the dialogue that would go into creating the tech for automatic audio starts depending on participant location.

Above you can see the mock experience where each house is at a different level that makes the participant have to go to different levels to see the images. I incorporated different perspective levels to give each person their own personal journey is having to stay actively listening to the story.