What is an interactive streaming series
and how will our audience interact with it?
An interactive streaming series,
simply put, is the next evolution of interactive television.
What we're bringing to the fundamentals
that were created for, say, Telltale Games
or Netflix’s Bandersnatch are a few things.
One, community,
all of the users, all of the viewers
will interact with our series simultaneously.
They will be influencing a continuously unfolding story canon
that they all experience together.
Everyone sees the same thing,
everyone participates in the same decisions.
And when those decisions are made,
that's canon for everyone.
You can't go play on a different server
and see something else happen.
You can't roll back and try again.
The entire community is causing the story
to change over time with their decisions.
That's the next
evolution of what it means
to have interactive entertainment
is that it's not just an individual experiencing a story,
but I'm experiencing a story with all of my friends
and we can talk about it and we can debate it,
we can disagree, we can agree,
and we can come together
and try to bring other people with us
to shape the story of what's going to happen.
And because we want to reward people
who are there for the live story events,
but not punish the people
and exclude the people
who weren't able to be there live,
we also have to do something with our narrative design
that's not really been done before,
where we have the decisions that are being made
remain open
for a day a week
so that everyone can participate.
The premise of SILENT HILL: Ascension is to take
the promise of the original SILENT HILL
and the brilliant mythology
they've developed of
how somebody’s individual trauma
and unresolved issues
can become very real threats
and monsters that can hurt you.
What we want to do is
to take that premise
and look at it across
a broader lens.
So we're going
to more global locations
and we're looking deeper
at how those relationships
may be impacted by this trauma.
So if I have unresolved trauma,
how does that impact not only me
but the people around me?
How does it affect the community?
And if it stays unresolved,
how might it affect my descendants?
If I never actually face it?
One of the things that we're introducing in
this SILENT HILL is the idea of collective delusion.
So this is not just localized to one person.
An entire town is experiencing this shared delusion,
which means that things could be real.
Things could be a figment of their imagination.
They really don't know.
And we're kind of playing with that idea within the narrative.
I think what's really critical here is
looking at the psychological trauma
and the psychological history of the characters,
because so much of what was
built in the original SILENT HILL
was about how these people's
anxieties and unresolved issues
became expressed and manifested in the world
as very real threats.
And so part of what we want to do is
to give that same suspense
and bring that into the storytelling
for SILENT HILL: Ascension.
So the most important thing for me was
to make these characters relatable to the audience,
that the audience cares about them
and wants to see them redeemed.
When we're doing character development,
these are really flawed, broken people.
These are people who've been through trauma.
These are people who've traumatized others,
and they're working through that.
Audience members actually get a chance
to help arc these characters.
They have a chance to help redeem these characters
or push them deeper into their trauma.
And there's something really powerful about that.
In order to do that,
we have to make the audience
be able to understand
why they did the things that they did.
SILENT HILL is a beautiful but disturbing meditation
on our human experience of trauma, guilt and fear
and how difficult it is to work our way through that,
how we can easily get lost in it.
Lost in the fog of our own trauma.
Not being able to move past it,
to be haunted by
what has happened to us and what we've done.
In terms of the visual design for this project.
Bad Robot has an absolutely incredible art direction team
and I think they really understand
the heartbeat of the franchise
and what fans expect in the design for creatures.
The creature designs are heavily inspired
by the core traumas,
and we have chosen to emphasize the trauma
between all of our characters as a collective whole.
Violence, domination and obsession.
The creatures in SILENT HILL are often projections
from the minds of the major characters.
The nature and the appearance of these creatures
are also linked to their surroundings,
which at times can create an
incredibly horrifying visual contrast.
The whole idea of how it holds tension was
perfect for me.
When I first got spoken to about it by Stephan.
I thought this… this would be perfect, actually,
because I almost feel like I've been living in SILENT HILL
for quite a number of years.
I've lived in a very surreal world.
The work of Akira Yamaoka
in the original score was definitely a great inspiration.
Fantastic mood setting.
What world am I living in?
And just sort of like setting the guidelines
for the inescapable sadness
and the inescapable
beauty, but also
horror.
One of the things that I think fans
are going to really appreciate
about this project is
we're really trying to be good stewards
with this franchise.
We really want to honor the things that
fans fell in love with in the first place.
They were telling amazing,
really bold stories with limited hardware
at a time when no one else was doing that.
And we want to carry that
same spirit of boldness with this project.
At its heart. SILENT HILL: Ascension is a mystery.
I think that's one of the things that
we really wanted to preserve
in terms of the SILENT HILL franchise,
that when you meet a character,
you don't know why they're there necessarily.
They're lost in the fog.
They're being stalked by creatures.
Why?
What brought them there?
What do they do?
What happened to them?
What did they experience?
And if that mystery
of those characters that we carry
throughout the entire season
and watch that mystery unravel,
discover who these characters really are.
And that's not always what you think.