Interviewer: I've generally started by posing the question in terms of your own story. That is, what you feel your desire line has been, what you think you're trying to accomplish, what that led you to do in terms of activity, you can go back as far as you think if relevant.

Megan Heyward: With I Am a Singer, it actually began its first incarnationas a linear short story. Due to the subject of someone who has amnesia,with fragmented knowledge of herself, it was extremely non-linear as I waswriting it. So it was chopping around all over the place, which is what Iwanted. Very fragmented. Which meant that it was not impossible to write,but it was starting to get to the point where I was thinking, this is maybenot suited to being a short story.

At the same time, I was getting interested in new media. And at the time when I was getting interested five or six years ago I do recall thatthere was a lot of discussion at the time about new media is all very fine,but where's the engagement, where's the story that I can really get involved with, really feel engaged and immersed with, really sort of relateto the characters. It ain't film, I can go in and do things, but where'sthe engagement, where's the emotional connectivity with these works.

At the time I was actually beginning to teach new media as well.And I started a master's program by doing research where I tried to turn that short story into a new media piece, which is what happened. I think that one of the first things was that I wished to seewhether or not it was possible to, number one, create a story that still made sense, even if it was non-sequential and non-linear, to a greater or lesser degree. And whether or not it was possible to make something that was emotionally engaging in this form. So there were two primary concernsfor me.

There were several other important issues for me. I wanted to make something that wasn't futuristic. I wanted to escape a highly futuristic techno aesthetic that dominated the genre of interactive work. I reallywanted to stay away from using too much text, because it appeared to me that great gobs of text on a screen was not that easy to read. I also wanted to incorporate sound very strongly into the work.

From the reaction I've had from people about I am A Singer, it
seems that yes, it can be emotionally engaging, and it also seems that you
can do it in a non-linear form. So it's just a matter of fine-tuning stuff
so that it's not so non-sequential that you're totally lost.

Interviewer: Let's go back one step before that, which is to say, why did you care to do that anyway? Where does your interest in new media come from?

Megan Heyward: That's a tricky one. I was relatively new to the area of computers. But my background had been sort of a jack of all trades, in that I'd worked in film and video production. I'd done editing, I wrote short stories, I was a musician. I guess on one level I'm also a bit of a control freak. So on one level there was this hey, you can do everything on the computer, which is really wonderful if you're a control freak, but also might be the ultimate cure, because it's so time consuming.

I also think new media is a unique opportunity, particularly at this time. And I think the window period is going to start to close in the next five years or so. For me, it's a bit like when film cameras were developed a hundred years ago and people were wildly experimenting all over the world, with quite different styles, asking themselves, "how the hell do you make a film, how do you convey a narrative in this new moving image form."

And I've always been very interested in film history and very interested in the alternative movements to the classical Hollywood narrative system, which developed between 1915 and 1920. In Europe there were surrealists and impressionists and expressionist film movements, which are still quite difficult for us to look at. Because they're just too unlike what we're used to in film, but are fascinating, because people were really experimenting with the form. And that period of film history I've always found very inspiring.

I've had the opportunity to experiment with this new "multimedia" form before the rules have been set in stone. The rules are rapidly becoming concretized as we speak. We've got the games genre and we've got the education genre. But when I started a couple of years ago, it was still a bit up in the air and people were saying we need your content desperately, because they all wanted the next big hit and everyone was looking for the key to creating riveting content.

I find it an enormously big challenge and time of experimentation. I don't know how much longer it's going to exist. But while that window of opportunity is there I want to jump in and go for it.

Interviewer: Can you describe your process in developing I Am A Singer.