Megan Heyward: It was a very long process, and I think that was actually quite important. It was also a difficult process, mainly because I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't have that many signposts along the way. There really weren't, and there still aren't that many narrative works in this form. There are hypertext works, which are wonderful, but they didn't have the same degree of graphical and animation and sound elements that I wanted to incorporate. So in a sense it's sort of like getting in the car, but not knowing how to drive, and you also don't know the rules of the road.

For example, one hundred years on from the creation of film we all know what to expect of a film. We've had 100 years of development, and we all know there's a beginning, and middle, and an end, except in rare independent films that shake up the genre. We know what to expect, and we know what edits do, and we know that movies build to a resolution. But we don't know those rules with regard to new media.

So in a sense I spent the first six or nine months of work, trying to get at how the hell do I get the text up on the screen without it being totally boring. And most of the stuff that I did from those first nine months I threw away.

Because I didn't have completion funding from the Australian Film Commission at that stage, I was doing it as a master's project, I didn't want to have to deal with the issue of digital video at that point. I wanted to deal with text. But eventually after about nine months of experimenting I came to the point of okay, what I'm going to do is condense the narrative down to the most concise expressions of what I was trying to evoke in terms of the character. Like working on a poem, I decided to really pare back from a narrative point of view. And just come up with small phrases that were concise yet evocative.

I then would animate them on the screen in a quite slow sort of pulsing manner, so that people could read them but they weren't totally bored by them. So they were quite large, but they were just pulsing on and off the screen, with music happening at the same time. And I developed each little movie concurrently with the soundtrack. I came to realize that the way to structure it would be to create a narrative of fragments, like a composition of narrative fragments that I interweaved and interlinked with each other. But the person that's using the project is the person that creates the meanings through associating all the fragments together.

And once I actually hit upon that creating the small phrases and then pulsing them on and off the screen, then I rapidly started building the work up and getting it happening. But it took quite a long time to get to that point. It was valuable, because I was working blind. I didn't know what the hell I was doing or whether it was possible or going to work.

It was a difficult process, but it was also a very exciting process. It's fun doing something that's a little bit different, where you don't know the rules, and you make them up as you go along.

Interviewer: Did you have a history of reading hypertext?

Megan Heyward: No, I actually didn't have a history of experiencing hypertext. I'm getting more into that now.