Week 3 | Activity 1 | The Blair Witch

The Blair Witch as a story utilised many forms of the identified story telling techniques in Lecture 2. In essence it is a cross media story the producers used a website with an ARG style to heighten awareness of the film, create hyperbole and interest in the movie itself which could be described as having an interactive threaded plot, or non linear structure. Once released it was a box office success and then came the DVD and assorted paraphernalia along with it.
At it’s height it is probably best described as Multimedia storytelling, which is what fascinates me most. It shows us how to exploit maximum exposure to the widest audience possible through the use of all of the available mediums in digital video. The use of the nonlinear format whereby the audience is enticed to decide what is real and what is fiction with websites, animations, creepy audio soundtracks and of course the now infamous hand held camera shots of one of the young female students filming herself at night, only showing her terrified eyes as she pants and cries and tells us how terrified she is, a classic in-story example of convergent journalism. The makers have every angle covered!


The use of the website to pull the audience in and want to know what happens is a very clever use of multimedia storytelling itself and holds well even today as a method of advertising, offering the film for sale at a very low price.

These techniques are now common amongst film makers but I don’t believe it has been done as well as the Blair Witch Project since.