Shape of Story

The audience members at Shape of Story used a smartphone-enabled web application to “tag” moments of emotional impact while watching seven short films. A visualization of their aggregated marks was shown after each short while they submitted comments to contextualize their reactions. The shape of each story and a curated selection of comments were displayed on the big screen during the discussion held after the screening. The crowd feedback helped structure the conversation. With the aid of a facilitator, Shape of Story can transform a traditional movie theater into a dynamic space for dialogue and debate, resulting in a memorable and informative collective experience.

For this project I was the lead full web stack engineer. I developed the following components:

• Logic Server

  • NodeJS

    • Express

    • Mongoose

  • MongoDB

• Presentation Web Application

  • HTML / CSS / JavaScript

  • Backbone / Require

  • Raphael

In addition to developing the web application that enabled this event I also managed our web stack. This involved configuration and load testing.

A big thanks to:

• Matt Fargo for mentorship and creating the audience mobile experience web app. 

• Norman Lau for visual design.

• Don Davis for technical support and setup for the event

• Andrew DeVigal for creating the idea, and connecting the project with Design Week Portland