scorched.tv website (ATOM Study Guide)

Scorched is a multi-media concept centred around a telemovie. The movie itself is like the tip of an iceberg the bulk of the experience is online, not on screen and the viewer can only understand the full breadth of the story and fictitious events by exploring the website.

Just as a Hypertext fiction approach allows the electronic reader to interact and move between several parallel strands of a story, Scorched offers a hypertext approach to a television drama by providing several related plots which interweave and exist in different narrative conventions telemovie, news broadcast, video blog (vlog), social network sites (Facebook, etc.) and viewer participation/interaction in blogs and video contributions. Minor characters on screen are expanded into their own complete stories in the web components.

This education section of the site provides two fundamental approaches.

The first is a set of subject area based approaches (following) which suggests conventional classroom approaches to the issues and problems raised by the drama itself.

The second approach is to use the news broadcast thread in the website as a guide to many of the issues raised in the storyline Global Warming, Refugees, Rural Crisis, Social Unrest and Protest, Health, Desalination, etc. News broadcasts hold up a mirror to our society, reflecting our concerns, interests and fears as well as our lifestyle and behaviour. As well as specific issues, there are also opportunities to examine the nature of news itself, the concept of what is newsworthy, the accusations of infotainment rather than genuine communication and even the fascination with celebrity those who have little to commend them apart from the sudden and accidental glare of the spotlight.