Red Thread of Fate
APRIL 2024
Contribution: Interaction Design, Illustration
Technology: P5.js, JavaScript, Procreate, Premeire Pro
Play here
Overview
An interactive retelling of the Red Thread of Fate folklore. By having two plays press buttons that slowly get closer, they represent the characters that also get gradually closer to each other, finding that love is based on choice rather than fate. The story follows an East-Asian Four Act structure as a project for my class Storytelling for Project Development.
Demo
Folklore
The original folktale of the Red Thread of Fate has many variations, but the one I adapted focuses on the Chinese folktale about how the Red String of Fate connects us to our soulmate. In the story, a boy was walking in the evening and stumbled upon an old man in the moonlight. The old man said his name was Yue Lao, and that he was the God of Marriage. Yue Lao showed him the girl he would eventually marry. The boy was young and had no interest in love, so he took a rock and threw it at the girl. Later in life, the boy was arranged to marry a woman, and when the meet, he notices that she wears an adornment over her eyebrow. He asks why, and she tells him that when a boy had thrown a rock at her when she was young. The boy realizes that Yue Lao was right, and he was indeed destined to marry this woman.In my adaptation, I added more to the story, changing it so that I could explore both the boy and the girl’s perspectives, give it a sense of setting, and create more of an arc that could fit into an East-Asian Four Act structure. I added the final scene of the Red Thread of Fate disappearing to not only create a larger arc to the story, but to add some of my own thoughts on the concept of fate and soulmates. Love is about choosing, not destined and chose for you.
My illustrations and story are accompanied by p5.js as an interaction medium, allowing the users to be a part of the story while reading/watching it. Choosing my story first, my goal was to make the users feel connected like the characters do in the story. By having the users press keys on the keyboard to go to the next scene, they are simultaneously allowed to read and experience the story at their own pace while also having to collaborate with each other to move it forwards. I programmed for different keys to be pressed for each scene, having the users consciously move their fingers towards each other while the characters also become closer.
I chose to have the story in two POVs to explore both sides of the story, which also aligned with having two users play the story at once. Two characters represented by two people playing and connecting over the experience.