Behind the scenes with Sam Barlow

The language doesn’t exist yet to describe (or even accurately categorize) what Sam Barlow is making. Which is probably why all our conversations, both during and after an exclusive set visit back in January, is a lot of uhm’s as we both grasp for the right words, and come away with poor approximations that capture only a fraction of its ingenuity.

Barlow is adamant about it being, in fact, a video game — though it mostly consists of live-action actors who’s you get to know through videos on a desktop. Technically it’s an FMV (full-motion video) game, but only as an afterthought. I guess it also falls under the umbrella of interactive TV, but don’t even think about comparing it to Bandersnatch. My personal favorite way of referring to it is as “interactive found footage,” like Blair Witch but detective and playable.

Then there’s all the scholarly terms that classify its type of storytelling: nonlinear and emergent. Still, none of that’s enough.

Image: annapurna interacive

“It’s a struggle. I tend to waffle a lot trying to explain it,” Barlow says of Telling Lies, the newly released spiritual successor to his wildly successful and acclaimed inaugural game Her Story. “But you can’t just come up with your own new nouns without sounding like a weird tech startup dude.”

Unlike weird tech startup dudes, though, the British native is one of the rare innovators of our time who (if anything) undersells how groundbreaking his work is.

After years of hollow promises from scholars, tech companies, and their marketers about the future of immersive storytelling, the convergence of mediums, and interactive cinema’s inevitable take over — it’s hard to trust again. 

But it’s even harder to deny that the dream is still alive in Her Story and Telling Lies.

Telling Lies is the story of four main protagonists told through a stolen NSA database with archival footage of their private video calls throughout a two-year period. You rewind and fast forward after dropping in randomly on snippets of their FaceTime-esque chats. And from there, you try to figure out what the hell is happening.

Saying too much more (including character names, professions, or literally anything) would spoil the experience of its core discovery mechanic, which is at the heart of what makes Telling Lies so revolutionary.

You uncover the story buried within this vast catalogue of 4-7 minute clips with keyword searches, which only give you access to the first five videos that use said term. It’s not unlike the real-world spying methods of British intelligence agency MI5, which the Snowden leaks revealed had compiled citizens’ private Yahoo webcam calls into a database organized by a metadata of the words used in each video.

Combining the oldest forms of entertainment with the newest ways we communicate, Telling Lies is probably best thought of as theater that plays out over video chat.

Something new, something old, something borrowed, something blew up

Described on paper — with words that haven’t quite caught up to the game’s innovation — it all sounds a bit technical and unsexy. In practice, within fifteen minutes or less of playing, anyone with a pulse finds themselves furiously taking notes on what clues to search for next like it’s an internet rabbit hole keeping you up way too late on Wikipedia.

That’s an experience just about every actor and crew member had before signing on to make something that’d never been done before. At least, that was their reaction after getting over the initial shock of receiving a 230-page script — about 100 pages more than a normal feature film.

“When I first got the script and weighed it, I pretty much immediately was like, ‘Uh no. No way,'” says Logan Marshall-Green, who you might recognize from The Invitation or Prometheus, and now as Telling Lies‘ star and executive producer. 

But he heard of Barlow before and loved Annapruna Interactive’s previous titles like Edith Finch. So he checked out Her Story first. 

Image: annapurna interactive

“Then I played that game for a good six hours straight. And pretty early on, I was like, ‘Well, OK, now I have to do this,'” he says. “Because this is new. This is a perfect mix of the kind of stories I want to tell, in the ways I want to tell them, through the mediums I love. I have to be part of this if I want to be at the forefront — on the frontlines of my profession.”

The same happened to Angela Sarafyan of Westworld fame. Funnily enough, despite being about the future of immersive storytelling gone wrong, the HBO sci-fi drama couldn’t be more traditional by contrast, not only shooting on film but in the style of classic Hollywood westerns (at least in the first two seasons). 

But Telling Lies is far from traditional. Like theater, each scene requires actors get it right in one single long take with no cuts or cheats. 

There’s also the issue of getting every single word from that 230-page script right because even a tiny improvisation, flub, or synonym can throw the whole search-word based storytelling structure off. So it’s someone’s whole job during the shoot to meticulously follow the script and flag even the slightest change from what’s written — like when Marshall-Green accidentally says “family” instead of “kid.”

“I have to be part of this if I want to be at the forefront — on the frontlines of my profession.”

But Sarafyan still sees one important commonality between both Westworld and Telling Lies: they’re stories designed to let audiences get lost in their worlds, though in vastly different ways. They also tap into that same modern impulse to dig deeper, take screenshots, overanalyze details, and share secrets on Reddit about how to unlock what you might’ve missed.

“This just couldn’t be more timely. It addresses stuff happening right now with our technology and through the medium itself, being able to be played on your phone,” says Sarafyan. 

The underlying themes of Telling Lies always come back to how our devices shape who we are, how we’re perceived, and the relationships we establish through them, particularly with Sarafyan’s character. It’s why nearly every scene takes places in people’s bedrooms, and contains some sort of high stakes human drama.

“What I was drawn to most in Sam’s work is that, as an audience member, you’re not just watching passively. You’re actively engaging in discovering what the story is for you, which story you want to see,” she says.

Though not a branching narrative (actually, almost the exact opposite, Barlow clarifies), the story of Telling Lies is still shaped by players following their own curiosity. The search function naturally leads you to follow the narrative threads and characters that interest you most. So even though Marshall-Green is the centerpiece bringing everyone together, Sarafyan’s character felt more like the main protagonist of my playthrough since I dug into her story most.

Image: annapurna interactive

“When I’m watching a film, I can be immersed through an emotional connection to the characters. But with this, it’s even more intimate because you reveal yourself through the process of how you experience the story,” she says. “That’s not like anything else. It’s an incredible new world for live action characters to live in.” 

As a whole, the atmosphere on set is one of infectious, electric excitement. Each moment of every day of the five-week shoot cannot be wasted since they needed to get through an average of 15-20 pages a day (as opposed to the typical 3-4). The breakneck speed of production was only matched by the palpable dedication from everyone to get it done, no mater what unique problem arises. 

The producers proudly showed me the custom-made camera rig the team spent a good month of pre-production inventing and perfecting to meet the unconventional needs of the shoot.

Partly state-of-the-art and partly held together by masking tape, the camera rig pretty much embodies the entire ethos of the project: scrappy but inventive, new but made from repurposed staples of traditional filmmaking. 

“Because it’s so weird I’m actually still the one telling everyone what the hell is happening.”

Consisting of a GoPro, sound rig, transmission system, and a monitor with a split screen of both scene partners, the actors operated the camera themselves to make it look like they’re holding phones. Mimicking the look of a Skype call, the monitor puts them in a little box in the upper left-hand corner while the other actor takes up the rest of the screen, with either a pre-recorded playback or live feed of them doing it live on a different part of the apartment compound set.

That’s yet another wrinkle in not just the production process, but also how players piece together Telling Lies‘ story. You only get one side of each video call at a time, requiring you to either hunt down or simply imagine what’s happening on the other side of the conversation.

But that also means the team had to shoot two concurrent sets with two separate crews at the same time.

“When we started I thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to come in and everyone else will know what they’re doing way better than me and I’ll just listen,” Barlow muses, watching the double monitors of the two simultaneous sets. “But because it’s so weird I’m actually still the one telling everyone what the hell is happening or how it all fits together. Because it’s not how anyone normally does it. But I also feel like that’s why we’re all incentivized to be here.”

Storytelling for the information age

What makes Telling Lies feel so prescient is how it meets modern day audiences where they are in every sense of the word. It’s not just a story told through a desktop and available on your phone. It’s a story that embraces the way the internet has transformed the way we consume media.

“It’s this weird contradiction where we claim that audiences are more and more easily distracted and shallower and we need to compete for their attention,” Barlow says, pointing to functions like Netflix’s autoplay or Skip Intro arising from this assumption. “But at the same time we’ve never before had an audience more willing to spend time digging into, digesting, and processing all the information in a piece of media.” 

The habit of doing extra research is almost a reflex in the digital age, whether it’s Googling to figure out why the fuck everyone on Twitter is suddenly talking about 30-50 feral hogs or YouTubing an explainer on the ending of Jordan Peele’s Us.

“The heart of what I tried to do with Telling Lies is reflect and map our innate desire to know more, to investigate, engage, figure out what’s really happening, read between the lines, and fill in the blanks with our own inferences and imagination,” he says.

He even sees this habit in the way his kids watch Netflix, which he finds both “maddening and incredible.” They completely ignore the carefully laid out linear indexes, instead skipping around to watch episode three of a season first because the thumbnail looks cooler, or instantly go to their favorite episode, rewinding and rewatching the funnies bits over and over again.

“They’re already basically Her Story-ing Netflix,” he says. “And I love the lack of boundaries in that.”

“The heart of what I tried to do with Telling Lies is reflect and map our innate desire to know more.” 

Skipping around the story, dropping in at random, dropping out whenever you get bored, and missing key plot points is literally embedded into the design of Telling Lies. And it goes back to how Barlow grew up interacting with traditional media like TV, with a sense of exciting discovery coming from catching a show midway through and trying to figure out what’s happening.

“Players inevitably come across like four minute clips of characters not necessarily doing much of anything, just inhabiting that role,” he says. “And that’s because I want it to feel like you’re seeing something by accident, undiscovered, and not like a director put it in front of you.”

Far from the branching narrative that people often assume Telling Lies to be, Barlow specifically designed it to feel as though there aren’t any preset paths at all. It’s also part of why he grates at  comparisons to Black Mirror‘s Bandersnatch, or any other “interactive cinema” that continues to plague the genre with what he views as “the curse of the choose-your-own-adventure.”

“I love that Bandersnatch was successful,” he clarifies. At least its popularity introduced a huge number of people to this new format. “But it’s a shame that it disregards twenty years of progress in interactive storytelling.And the worst part is how it gives the impression of solving problems in the genre by lampshading them through the gimmicks of ’80s choose-your-own adventures. And because of the Black Mirror snark and meta-ness, it gets to dodge all of these hard questions that still need solutions in the choice-based live action space.”

Image: annapruna interactive

The stark contrast between Barlow’s work and what Bandersnatch does ultimately comes down to sincerity. Barlow forgoes cheekiness and shock value to instead focus on ways to imbue interactive video with the same amount of depth, connection, and subtlety of a novel.

“I wanted the intimacy to feel less like the voyeurism of film, and more like the closeness of inhabiting a first-person perspective in a book, where you experience the character’s thoughts and inner world,” he says. It can be easy for all this footage of people in their bedrooms to feel, well, gross and invasive. “So we avoided that voyeuristic gaze attached to the camera by making you embody the point of view of the person on the other side of the conversation. You’re made to feel like either part of the conversation, or some sort of invisible, objective specter.”

Ultimately, though, Barlow wants there to be a sense that the intimacy you feel through these video chats is a false one. He’s playing into the difference between the connections we forge in real life versus the ones we forge through a mediated platform like Skype.

“Even something as basic as eye contact is transformed in digital because, in order to meet someone’s gaze, you have to look at a camera. And it might feel like eye contact to you, but it’s not genuine,” he said. 

Throwing out everything but the kitchen sink

Perhaps what makes Sam Barlow tell digital stories like no one else is just how skeptical he himself is of all the grandiose statements people make about what makes interactivity special.

A game industry veteran known for the unconventional and beloved Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Barlow left AAA game development to go indie out of sheer frustration with all the presumed requirements for what makes a video game a video game. He wrote a blog post during the making of Her Story, titled ‘Please, Games: Throw Out Everything But The Kitchen Sink,’ and another one about all the things he’d do with this new type of game that other games are bad at. 

“What always pissed me off about video games is this holodeck ideal — that our end goal for the future is to make virtual worlds that are indistinguishable from reality. But to me, that just stops being a story,” he says. “Because what makes stories interesting is that you have little bit of perspective, a little distance.” 

Yes, it’s important to embody and empathize with characters. But players don’t necessarily need a single protagonist to identify with and project themselves onto, like conventional game design dictates. Similarly, TV and film doesn’t need to centralize everything around one main protagonist. That’s why you end up with problems like Breaking Bad, which couldn’t satisfactorily resolve our need to empathize with the anti-hero without also giving him a happy ending.

“Even those more richer shows, the structure of a beginning middle and end embedded in episodes defines and limits to some extent how much I can relate to the characters in the show,” he says. “So the idea here was to add four characters who each individually has a features-length worth of video to be found, and really just letting you jump between their perspectives and latch onto whoever you want.”

Barlow says some of the best storytellers in history like Hitchcock intentionally pushed back on the audiences’ suspension of disbelief.

Barlow says some of the best storytellers in history like Hitchcock intentionally pushed back on the audiences’ suspension of disbelief, empathy, and immersion. That’s why Barlow added another layer of protagonist confusion, in the form of an unnamed woman’s reflection always present on the desktop screen (who is later explained). It creates that push and pull between the audience and story, breaking them out of immersion in order to make them think even more about what exactly this narrative is doing.

Barlow doesn’t even really subscribe to the 3-5 act structure we tend to think of as fundamental to all storytelling. Because, “it only exists because the human bladder could only stand being in a theater for so long.”

Yet despite that being less of a concern for TV, it inherited the same structure anyway, and created new conventions for ad breaks. “Even now with streaming, the only big innovations we’ve really seen to these established structures is bingeing — which is just the same exact existing structure, only it lets you choose your own toilet breaks.”

Instead, the story structure Barlow most ascribes to is “a bit obvious, actually.” It’s sequence theory, which simply posits that, when you break down any given story into fragments, each one of those fragments should be interesting in itself. Every scene, every exchange of dialogue, every line in a script should be able to stand on its own.

“Then, you know, worst case scenario if you just throw things at someone in a random order, it will probably still be interesting, if a bit more confusing,” he says. 

Which is basically the best summary of Telling Lies I’ve heard yet.

Delivering on the promise of storytelling’s future

In the past decade, we’ve been bombarded with assumptions about what the future of storytelling will and should look like — from virtual and augmented reality to interactive cinema. Yet every time, all we get is either more of the same bullshit or something laughably unnecessary. 

“So much of my frustration from working with traditional game publishers was seeing how it felt like, for all this talk of video games being the next big thing in stories, we were moving awfully slow,” says Barlow.

Image: annapruna pictures

Then after Her Story‘s success got him tons of meeting with Hollywood types, he learned why the answer to the future of storytelling probably wouldn’t be found in film and TV either.

“The problem is that most decision makers who need to greenlight more of a convergence between the two only want to get into games out of sheer terror,” he says. “They’re petrified that kids are playing Fortnite, and not watching TV. They want the stickiness of games while only having an abstract concept of what they really even are.”

Regardless, waning business has left Hollywood desperate for whatever games can give them.

Yet, “the biggest mistake I’ve seen firsthand is a level of snobbishness towards games and interactive. People come in and say, ‘We want to try and do an interactive thing — and we’re going to bring in Big Expensive Screenwriter Person to do it because they play games.”

“The biggest mistake I’ve seen firsthand is a level of snobbishness towards games.”

Despite respecting the impressive revenue generated by games, the majority of Hollywood couldn’t care less about understanding the actual artistry and creativity of making them. As a result, they bring on notable names like Steven Soderbergh or Charlie Booker, who then embed interactivity into their traditional media without any consideration for what game makers have spent decades figuring out.

The world of games and TV seem destined to stay siloed in their own respective ruts. Aside, that is, from the rare occasion when the right creator teams up with the right publisher.

I still don’t have the right words to describe exactly what Telling Lies is, and everything it accomplishes. Barlow doesn’t either, but in meetings with those Hollywood types, they throw around words like “database storytelling” and dream of licensing the tech to internet influencers. 

“Well, if you think of any ideas for nouns or how to describe this thing, let me know,” Barlow says in our last conversation, after I’d finally finished playing that never-before-done thing I saw him making seven months ago.

But really the only descriptor you need for Telling Lies is that it’s fucking great.