Year: 1997

Title: Namaste MPC

Type: Film

Role(s): Story / Director / Producer     

Company: Retina Circus

Overview:

Set in Manchester during the late 1990s, this short 30 minute film follows the exploits of three young crooks at the fringes of society. Directed by Stott, this tale has a dark comic book ethos, fragmenting narration, and innovative cinematography. Selected for screening at Leeds International Film Festival and Raindance (1997) among others.

Year: 2000

Title: Blues Player

Type: Interactive CD-ROM 

Role(s): Creator / Producer

Company: Retina Circus

Overview:

This CD-ROM – with three experimental interactive programs – was at the cutting edge of the emergent digital revolution of the day. Machine One is a generative animation engine creating random images for music – ‘Digital Graffiti’ from Tetsuo (1998). Blu.mov was a branching narrative in reverse, multiple starting points converging on a single event. Blues Player was an mp3 player and visualiser using random sequences of video to accompany the user’s choice of playlist.

Year: 2001

Title: NTR

Type: Interactive film     

Role(s): Director/ Producer

Company: Retina Circus

Overview:

Entering a New Ride was Big Audio Dynamite’s ninth and final album. Recorded in 1997, it was so radical the record company refused to release it. So the band took matters into its own hands and gave it away for free via the BAD online fan forum. To accompany this release – one of the earliest internet album downloads – Stott created an interactive movie around three of the tracks: "Man, That Is Dynamite!", “Taking You To Another Dimension”, and “Get High”. Written by Tim Birch and starring Wayne Simmonds, the movie was a film noir-ish story of Rude Boy (a character created by Wayne Simmonds and reusing clips from Simmonds own video art pieces). The story follows Rude Boy coming to the city, being groomed as a hitman by Johnny Summers and eventually taking out a hit on the one person he could not face. The movie was given away free on the BAD online fan forum and was screened with a live element (Simmonds playing the interactive movie) at events in Manchester and New York.

Year: 2002

Title: Interface

Type: Interactive film

Role(s): Director / Producer

Company: Retina Circus

Overview:

Interface is a short, interactive movie in six chapters, five of which conclude with decision points. The interactive movie was originally commissioned for Barry Adamson’s new website (under the title of “The Crime Scene” in 2002. Structured like a game with branching narrative and limited lives, Stott transforms the viewer into a gamer. The narration follows the Transcendental Detective (Wayne Simmonds) as he investigates a grisly murder; and the images are set to “The Crime Scene”, a track from Barry Adamson’s 2002 album The King Of Nothing Hill.

Year: 2003

Title: Life in a Day

Type: Music video

Role(s): Writer / Director

Company: Retina Circus

Overview:

The first of a trilogy of music video collaborations between Stott and the folk-rock band I Am Kloot for singles from their second eponymously named album of 2003. For Life in a Day, Stott created a fractured montage of fake security camera footage framing a feral night-time Manchester.

Year: 2004

Title: From Your Favourite Sky

Type: Music video

Role(s): Writer Director

Company: Retina Circus

Overview:

For this second I Am Kloot collaboration, Stott followed the band as they played live on their late 2003 tour of UK and Europe, capturing footage from several gigs. Selected images were then manipulated in post-production to create a conceptual performance video.

Year: 2004

Title: Proof

Type: Music video

Role(s): Writer / Director

Company: Retina Circus

Overview:

Starring Christopher Eccleston, this third Kloot collaboration is radically different from the previous music videos. Eschewing the fragmentary montage approach, for Proof Stott filmed a long take of the actor’s face as he listened to the track. An intense and intimate portrayal of the affect of music and the emotions it creates in us all.

Year: 2005

Title: I Am Kloot - Live at the Ritz 2003

Type: Concert film

Role(s): Director / Producer

Company: Retina Circus

Overview:

Filmed in late 2003 at I Am Kloot’s homecoming gig at Manchester’s The Ritz, Stott directed a six camera team to capture the essence of the band playing live. Eight song performances were released on DVD as ‘Live At The Ritz’, the second disc of a special edition of I Am Kloot’s third album Gods and Monsters (2005). The rest of the gig remains locked away in the Retina Circus vault.

Year: 2003-2008

Title: Crimeface

Type: Interactive film

Role(s): Creator / Producer

Company: Retina Circus / Bellyfeel

Overview:

Following on from the Big Audio Dynamite and Barry Adamson collaborations, Stott developed the narrative themes and interactive processes from those projects into something much bigger, and darker. Working once again with Wayne Simmonds and co-starring David Crellin, the script by Stott and Richard Davis revolves around a hacker recruited to a shadowy police unit to solve a murder involving computer crime. Early versions of Crimeface intermixed filmic-narration and game-play, but in its final form it is a serialised drama woven from a hybrid of music, literature, script, video, animation, sound, and pictures. The production went on to win two prizes at the 2008 Webby Awards: both the Webby and People's Voice awards for the Online Film & Video - Experimental category.

Year: 2009-2010

Title: People’s Stories

Type: Interactive website

Role(s): Creator / Producer

Company: Bellyfeel

Overview:

People’s Stories was a community-based site of user generated content for Liverpudlians and the scouse diaspora. A companion piece to the award winning Of Time and the City, a collage of old documentary and newsreel footage directed by Terence Davies celebrating the culture of Liverpool. To further engage audiences with the elegiac themes and fragmentary nature of Davies’ project, Stott created a website where participants could upload text, images and film clips, which they and others could then view and interact with.

Year: 2009-2011

Title: The Alexander Wilson Project

Type: Transmedia experience

Role(s): Creator / Producer

Company: Bellyfeel

Overview:

Just as with the earlier Crimeface, The Alexander Wilson Project was an evolving, living venture – although this time even wider in scope, starting with a storyworld (the imaginary English town of Sheerport)which spun out various media entities. Over the three years Stott had multiple collaborators, including the writer Richard Davies and the iconic director / cinematographer Philip Shotton (inventor of the term Madchester!). Truly transmedia and composed of granular multimedia content, this interactive thriller emerged via short films, live events, games, and animations.

Year: 2011-2016

Title: Bolton Storyworld: Codename Winterhill

Type: Transmedia experience  

Role(s): Showrunner

Company: Bellyfeel

Overview:

Bolton Storyword began as a collaboration between Stott and students at a university media department, and – after a series of evolutions, reframings, and reworkings – concluded five years later with an award-wining five day transmedia event. Taking place on a participant’s smartphone and using a Participant Activated Release Schedule (PARS), the story concerned missing persons, conspiracy theories, and secret societies – told through text messages, images, film clips, and online puzzles. The critical consensus from the judging panel at the Learning on Screen Awards was that Codename Winterhill was an ‘'innovative and immersive piece of digital storytelling … unlike anything the jury have seen before’. It won the prestigious Premier Award for 2016.

Year: 2015

Title: Set the Storyworld to Random

Type: Book

Role(s): Author

Company: Bellythink

Overview:

Over the decade or so Stott was innovating his interactive, transmedia narrations and game-playing story-worlds, he began sharing his thoughts on this emergent new media territory via his Bellyfeel Blog and as a guest on other platforms. This extended period of ongoing reflection resulted in the book Set the Storyworld to Random: How to Connect with Modern Transmedia Audiences. The key to modern story-games, as Stott claims in the intro, is to focus on the audience: ‘they are the ones to watch’.

Year: 2017

Title: Mid Game Crisis

Type: Game 

Role(s): Creator / Producer

Company: Bellyfeel / Heroes Villains Gamers

Overview:

Mid Game Crisis is an interactive story game for smartphone and tablets which saw Stott experimenting with more short-form one-off experiences. A left-field and somewhat bizarre tale on the subject of divorce, it none-the-less delivers an emotionally impactful user engagement.

Year: 2017-ongoing

Title: Secret Story Network

Type: Interactive story game platform

Role(s): Creator / Producer

Company: Bellyfeel

Overview:

SSN is a live role-playing interactive storytelling experience hosted over chat-apps. With specially commissioned stories (including transmedia tie-ins, the Australian soap opera Neighbours and Titan Effect tabletop game), each standalone event is led by a story conductor and played by participants who each of whom is assigned their own character. During the first phase of SSN the host platform was Whatsapp. In parallel, development began on an SSN app that will allow participants to create their own stories, worlds and events. Live trials of the SSN app began in 2022, and it is expected to launch in 2023.

Year: 2025 forthcoming

Title: Clive is a Good Guy

Type: Game 

Role(s): Creator / Producer

Company: Indolent Games

Overview:

Currently in production, this interactive smartphone storygame features highly reactive split screen and full motion video battle royale sequences. Starring Neil Bell (Shameless, 24 Hour Party People, Dead Man's Shoes, Dune) it’s about someone who looks into a mirror and encounters multiple versions of themselves. Launched under the Bellyfeel subsidiary of Indolent Games, this will be the first of a series of highly innovative story-games taking arthouse transmedia experiences to a whole new level.

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