Hench, by being set in the espionage genre, and following the henchman of an evil villain, offers a commentary on the modern working world by serving as a metaphor for the corporate workplace. The film follows a lowly henchman, Hank, who learns to challenge this corporate structure by achieving self-respect, thanks to an unlikely friendship with a James-Bond-esque agent. This creative explication explains how Hench achieves commentary on how large corporate structures operate to maintain control over employees, and the effects this has on individuals. It further highlights the tools and techniques used to formulate Hench into a fully realised feature screenplay.

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Au début des années 1950, le cinéma japonais achève de se remettre des restrictions d'abord imposées par le régime militariste, puis entraînées par la défaite du pays. L'industrie cinématographique prospère rapidement et puise dans la littérature des histoires pour les films qu'elle doit produire à une cadence toujours plus élevée afin de répondre à la demande des salles de cinéma. C'est dans ce contexte que Naruse Mikio (1905-1969) a réalisé six films inspirés de textes de Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951). Ces films sont représentatifs tout à la fois des relations que les institutions littéraires et cinématographiques entretenaient à l'époque où les films ont été réalisés, du rôle joué par la littérature dans la politique de production des studios de cinéma et de la façon dont l’adaptation était perçue par la critique de cinéma.Mais outre la présentation de ces aspects contextuels et historiques, l'objectif de cette thèse est de dégager des pistes qui aideraient à appréhender l'œuvre de Naruse Mikio à travers l'examen des choix qu'il opère lors du processus d'adaptation, que ce soit au niveau du sujet, de la construction du récit, ou encore de la mise en scène. Naruse parvient à trouver un équilibre entre ses ambitions formelles et les exigences du récit en élaborant avec virtuosité un style effacé ou « invisible ». Pour tenter d'en faire ressortir les particularités, notre effort s'est concentré sur l'analyse des éléments de notre corpus (films, textes et scénarios). Dans cette entreprise, les textes de Hayashi constituent un référent précieux qui aide à déterminer les rapports que le cinéaste entretient avec son sujet, avec le scénario ou encore avec les contraintes inhérentes au cadre dans lequel il travaille. / In the early fifties, the Japanese film industry had almost recovered from the restrictions imposed first by the military regime and then from Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War. The industry then prospered rapidly and found in literature the stories needed in order to produce enough movies to comply to the always growing demand of the cinemas. It was in this context that Naruse (1905-1969) realized six movies inspired by Hayashi Fumiko's (1903-1951) works. These movies are exemplary of the relationship between literary institutions and the film industry at the time they were shot. They are also typical of the importance of literature in the production policy of the diverse film studios as well as the manner movie critics received these screen adaptations.Besides the presentation of the contextual and historical aspects, our objective is to identify ways which would help to discover Naruse Mikio's works through the filter of choices made by him at the time of the adaptation, be it when choosing the topic, the story construction or the stage direction. Naruse was able to find a balance between his formal ambitions and the requirements of the story by skillfully elaborating a subdued or “invisible” style. In order to highlight the singularities of his personal style, we have concentrated our effort on the analysis of the diverse elements of our corpus: the films, texts and scripts. In this endeavour Hayashi’s writings are a precious point of reference helping us to determine the precise nature of the relationship the film director had with his subject, with the script as well as the constraints imposed by the frame he was working in.

Creative Project Abstract: The creative project of this thesis is a script prototype for Underland, a crime drama video game and digital playable story that demonstrates writing and design methods for negotiating narrative and player agency. The story is set in October 2006 and players are investigative psychologists given access to a secure police server and tasked with analysing evidence related to two linked murders that have resulted in the arrest of journalist Silvi Moore. The aim is to uncover what happened and why by analysing Silvi’s flat, calendar of events, emails, texts, photos, voicemail, call log, 999 call, a map of the city of Plymouth and a crime scene. It is a combination of story exploration game and digital epistolary fiction that is structured via an authored fabula and dynamic syuzhet and uses the Internal-Exploratory and Internal-Ontological interactive modes to negotiate narrative and player agency. Its use of this structure and these modes shows how playable stories are uniquely positioned to deliver self-directed and empathetic emotional immersion simultaneously. The story is told in a mixture of enacted, embedded, evoked, environmental and epistolary narrative, the combination of which contributes new knowledge on how writers can use mystery, suspense and dramatic irony in playable stories. The interactive script prototype is accessible at underlandgame.com and is a means to represent how the final game is intended to be experienced by players. Thesis Abstract: This thesis considers writing and design methods for playable stories that negotiate narrative and player agency. By approaching the topic through the lens of creative writing practice, it seeks to fill a gap in the literature related to the execution of interactive and narrative devices as a practitioner. Chapter 1 defines the key terms for understanding the field and surveys the academic and theoretical debate to identify the challenges and opportunities for writers and creators. In this it departs from the dominant vision of the future of digital playable stories as the ‘holodeck,’ a simulated reality players can enter and manipulate and that shapes around them as story protagonists. Building on narratological theory it contributes a new term—the dynamic syuzhet—to express an alternate negotiation of narrative and player agency within current technological realities. Three further terms—the authored fabula, fixed syuzhet and improvised fabula—are also contributed as means to compare and contrast the narrative structures and affordances available to writers of live, digital and live-digital hybrid work. Chapter 2 conducts a qualitative analysis of digital, live and live-digital playable stories, released 2010–2016, and combines this with insights gained from primary interviews with their writers and creators to identify the techniques at work and their implications for narrative and player agency. This analysis contributes new knowledge to writing and design approaches in four interactive modes—Internal-Ontological, Internal-Exploratory, External-Ontological and External-Exploratory—that impact on where players are positioned in the work and how the experiential narrative unfolds. Chapter 3 shows how the knowledge developed through academic research informed the creation of a new playable story, Underland; as well as how the creative practice informed the academic research. Underland provides a means to demonstrate how making players protagonists of the experience, rather than of the story, enables the coupling of self-directed and empathetic emotional immersion in a way uniquely available to digital playable stories. It further shows how this negotiation of narrative and player agency can use a combination of enacted, embedded, evoked, environmental and epistolary narrative to employ dramatic irony in a new way. These findings demonstrate ways playable stories can be written and designed to deliver the ‘traditional’ pleasure of narrative and the ‘newer’ pleasure of player agency without sacrificing either.