By Outis

    I chose to create an interactive version of Rashomon for my senior project because it provided an excellent story that could be told from multiple perspectives.  Initially I thought of creating an original work that could be converted to an interactive form, but the short period of time available to me made that impractical.  A few months ago I had heard that Japanese director Akira Kurosawa had passed away.  My interest spurred, I rented The Seven Samurai.  I enjoyed the film and in passing was told that I should see Rashomon.  I couldn’t find it in any video stores, but bought a used copy at Half-Price books.  I watched it and was confused.  I didn’t know quite what had happened.  This was about early October and I knew I had to make a decision as to what I was going to do for my project.  By mid-October I had abandoned the idea of an original work and concentrated on adapting Rashomon.

The Script
 
    I had already decided that no matter what subject I was going to explore, it would be web-based.  Thus, my first task was to get Rashomon in text and onto a computer disk.  I searched the web for an online script of the movie, but could find none.  At that pointed I adopted the brute-force approach.  I pulled my VCR as close to my computer as possible and typed in every sub-titled line of dialogue from the movie into Microsoft Word along with narrative descriptions of every scene.  So, every line of dialogue spoken in the movie appears in this work.  With other school work it took me about a week and a half to translate all eighty-seven minutes of film into text.
    At that point I used as a template that one continuous narrative for each main character in the film: the Stranger, Tajomaru the Bandit, the Man, the Woman, the Woodcutter, and the Priest.  The first character I worked on was the Stranger.  I pushed through, changing the narrative to the first person perspective of the Stranger and noting where I thought perspective changes should be and to whose perspective.
    I faced two problems that this point.  First, how was I to convey changes in time in the film?  Second, how faithful was I to remain to the film in representing spoken dialogue and when a visual scene took over for spoken words.  To address the first problem I initially decided to use Italics to denote any flashback.  However, this became a problem in the situation of a flashback within a flashback.  Not wanting to add confusion to the work, for the good of the user as well as myself, I decided that only scenes concerning the murder would be in Italics.
    To address the second problem I decided I to remain strongly faithful to the film.  For example, when the Woodcutter begins telling the story of what he witnessed, the camera is on him as he speaks, then the shot changes to a flashback of the woods with a voice-over for a while.  I described it as it was shown. I did not keep the Woodcutter at the Ruined Gate, describing what he had seen in the past tense, but put him in the present tense in the flashback.  I also decided that all scenes would be in the present tense to reduce confusion.  Italics would indicate time shifts.
    A third problem I faced was how to end three of the character’s narratives.  The Stranger, Woodcutter, and Priest are all in the same location and hear each other say the same things.  Towards the end of the film, the Stranger leaves.  Thus, his narrative would end at that point, while the Woodcutter’s and Priest’s would go on.  The Man, Woman, and Tajomaru’s narratives are more complex because they are not always telling the whole truth.  So, the question is, should I tell what really happened in their narrative, or what they say happened?  I chose to stand by the film and describe what they say happened.  Also, this would increase playability by making the user search for the one true story as told eventually by the Woodcutter instead of having the whole story revealed in every narrative.

The Perspective Changes
 
    Originally, I determined that I wanted the user to have to piece together the true story of the murder.  In the film Rashomon, the viewer has to wait until the end of the movie to get the whole story.  In this interactive presentation, the user can start as any of the characters, going though the story, changing perspectives to uncover the truth.  However, a character can only link to the perspective of a character that they have seen or are currently in the vicinity of.  In other words, the Stranger cannot link to Tajomaru’s perspective because he never met him.
    While writing the first narrative, the Stranger’s, I wrote in brackets the places where perspective changes should occur and to whose.  I labeled all points in a narrative where a perspective should change to another character’s or another character’s should change to the current character’s.  These points were labeled alpha-numerically: S6 represented the sixth perspective-point in the Stranger’s narrative.
    I used the Stranger’s narrative as a template for the other five and made the appropriate changes.  This took several weeks.  Finally, about late-November, I was ready to check the correctness of the links and chart them.  I found this difficult to do in the word processor, so I printed out all the narratives and laid them out on the floor in parallel.  I drew up a chart, with the characters along the X-axis and perspective links on the Y-axis.  For each character’s narrative, I noted where I had placed the perspective changes.

Implementation

    With the chart complete, I could begin implementation to the web.  I laid out the narratives on different web pages and placed anchors at the perspective points.  Each character’s narrative was in a different color to reduce confusion.  Within a day and a half, my version of Rashomon was online.  I sent out email to friends in order to get feedback.  One respondent expressed confusion, she was lost in a narrative.  So, I went back and shaded any time different from the present-time at the Ruined Gate, whether the time shift was back to before the murder, during the murder, or after the murder, but not the present.  I used a darker shade of each color to denote the time shift.  So, in total I used shading and Italics in conjunction to denote the user’s location in time in the narrative.

  Conclusion
 
    This presentation of Rashomon is, I believe, a faithful representation of the original.  I did not want to take much in the way of artistic license with such a well-respected film.  The only artistic changes made came from the first-person aspects of the narratives.  Sometimes, a narrative had to be begun slightly before the character’s first appearance in the film.  Sometimes I added appropriate thoughts, religious thoughts for the Priest, for example.  I did not add any facts to the background of any character, only a few mental thoughts about the heat of the day or something already apparent from the film.
    This version of Rashomon, I assert, is closer to what Kurosawa thematically intended.  The user has to, like a detective, search out and piece together the story of what happened or they can be satisfied with what some of the characters tell them.
 
 

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