StagePlay

StagePlay is a mobile application enabling users to read and enjoy dramas by adding visual depictions and cues, providing greater immersion than mere textual reading. Typical dramas and screenplays are clinical in the way they are written and not truly fun to read for most people. They are pages and pages of descriptions of the setting and dialogs, all textual. While it is rather common for people to read magazines, short stories and novels, it is somewhat a rarity that a person chooses to read a drama, even though there are many well-written, even famous, dramas!

But why is that? It is true that dramas are typically written to be performed on a stage. So its layout is not geared towards consumption by a reader. On the other hand, comics are wildly popular with an ardent fan base. If we look upon comics as a static and two-dimensional “staging” of a drama (complete with dialogs and acts and scenes etc), then we realize that what is missing from a typical drama as written is a visual element. By attempting to add this missing visual element, StagePlay hopes to make it more fun to read dramas.

Uses

StagePlay can have many uses - A reader looking for a more fun way to read a drama A writer of a screenplay could use StagePlay to “stage” their play as they write, to get a feel of how it would look when staged, ensuring proper timelines and transitions etc. Funny online chats and IRC conversations could be compiled into comic-like depictions, allowing them to be easily shared with anyone over social media

Status

StagePlay was created as a term project for a first course in Mobile Programming for Android. It was implemented by a team of three students.

Future Plans/Ideas

There are a lot of exciting possibilities in the roadmap for StagePlay. Here are some of the ideas we have originally come up with, some of which have also been mentioned to us upon demonstrating the product -

• Have a web hosted library of formatted ebooks/dramas that are accessible to people. From here they can download and enjoy books.
• Show curtain-dropping between different Acts and at the end of the play
• Create a web service to render a given play (a specifically formatted text file, say) into the Playfile format
• Create an editor for people to create their own plays, complete with an editor for the characters, dialogues and the configuration.
• Add text-to-speech so people can listen and read the plays. Speech would have to be gender-specific for which more meta-data would have to be configured and retained per actor.
• Enable the social aspect of StagePlay such that entire plays or specific (set of) scenes can be shared over social media (Facebook, for instance) or email
• Display more than one character at a time, just like on a stage. The entering and exiting of characters can also be similarly depicted.
• Potentially use slight panning or other camera positioning tricks upon actors to give them minor movement. Ensure this does not take away from the dialogues or the flow of the play.
• Add optional background music such that users can choose their own music or one can be included with the ebook package
• Context-aware images per the dialogue being spoken by extracting mood using Natural Language Programming (NLP)
• Background images/scenery per the rendered scene
• Dynamic transition times based on dialogue length
• Optimization (both memory and performance) of loading and rendering the plays
• Support for more image formats
• Animated transition of the dialogue scenes (optional)
• Support landscape mode along with portrait mode and across various screen sizes
• Possibly have an in-built or separate editor app to create/edit plays
• Add the application to Google’s Play Store for wider consumption and feedback