Cinema Writing

One of the main sections of Pry that intrigued me would be Chapter 3 with the read-aloud braille. I found this intriguing because in a digital-screen setting, braille seems to be essentially useless. However, I feel that this portion worked well with the main character reading aloud as the user ran their finger across the screen.

Another section that I found intriguing was Chapter 4, where the main character is paranoid that his friend is going to try to kill him. I liked how Pry shows this paranoia by blurring the main characters normal vision, thus encouraging the user to see his subconscious, which ends up being riddled with possible murder weapons and different deaths. I feel like this connected well with the introductory portion of the app, where the main characters girlfriend attempts to kill him in a jump-scare as well.

These two moments in the app both contribute small details to the constantly growing story, hinting at different key factors that the user should take note of. One of these especially being that the main character has a fear of being murdered by those he cares about.

I feel that the combination of text and video in this app works very well, and the exploratory method of “prying” between video and text and a combination of both makes it very intuitive for the user to traverse whichever of the main three narrative structures that they want to, whenever they want to (within the allowance of the narrative).

I think that this work is about a person with PTSD and/or schizophrenia. I believe this because the way the narrative plays out and provides us with both reality and subconscious fears is very similar and accurate how it feels to have real-life anxiety. It becomes hard to distinguish between what’s actually happening and what is a fear, and I think the constant switching between conscious and subconscious helps to blur the separation and make the truth even more indistinguishable. The flashbacks and worst-case-scenario subconscious beliefs definitely hint towards this work focusing on a character that has some sort of mental illness.