The entertaining or experimental ending: the temptations of drama and anti-drama during the editing of an interactive film

The conventions of dramatic endings impose limitations on how writer-directors conceptualise narrative closure within film. The introduction of interactivity into the filmmaking process disrupted the established pathways through which a writer-director typically constructs a film's conclusion. Following the completion of the screenwriting and production phases of an interactive feature film which branches off to multiple endings, I understood that the narrative system I had devised supported only a shallow level of interactivity in that the narrative could only diverge into five possible endings. This structural shallowness stemmed, in part, from my initial bias towards the creation of a traditional linear film which privileged a single dramatic ending over and above an interactive one which would allow for more diverse endings. During the editing phase, I reconfigured sections of the film to generate additional endings which embraced the diversity of narrative possibilities I had initially resisted. In this paper, I elaborate on one anti-climatic and two deliberately anti-dramatic endings of the film and, through a process of reflective practice, I interrogate the dynamic between drama and anti-drama in narrative construction. The inclusion of a conventionally dramatic ending functioned as a legitimising mechanism, enabling a deeper exploration of my experimental, anti-dramatic impulses.