‘Dodging the Bullet’ Roles – Week 7
The project we have been assigned is to design a trans-media story that can be presented to audience members in a creative way. My partner Neeve and I decided to brainstorm ways in which we could best represent our generation, which is highly reliant on social media for communication and information. Loosely inspired by the MTV series “Catfish”, we wanted to construct a narrative that reflected the uncertainty and speculation surrounding online relationships, with a particular focus on teenagers to become not only our subjects but also our target audience. This is where we formed the project name – “Dodging the Bullet”.
Myself and Neeve have agreed to equally share the workload and production of all aspects of this narrative. For us, the majority of the assignment work is in the production, rather than the presentation. We assigned each other to our respective characters, for which we will be maintaining their social media platforms of Facebook and Facebook chat. I will take on the role of “Miranda”, the 17 year old girl who is being ‘Catfished’ by “Tyler”/Joshua, who Neeve will construct the social media profile for. The major social media platform for our story is Facebook Chat, and we want to achieve a real-time aspect for this so we will need to together, write a script of a conversation, and both screen record it using Quicktime, so that audiences can watch Tyler and Miranda get to know each other. This means using language and expressions synonymous with teenagers and young adults to create an authenticity to the characters. On the note of authenticity/believability, Neeve and I both need to regularly update our characters Facebook profiles by adding pictures and status updates.
Some other roles we have decided on are that I am in charge of writing diary entries as Miranda, detailing her experiences and emotions towards Tyler, so that we can see this all from her point of view, and I will also be in charge of script writing for video entries which add another media platform to the assignment. Neeve will therefore have the responsibility of filming the perspective of Miranda (Neeve’s younger sister/our actress!) and she will also film from the creepier perspective of Tyler who is “stalking” Miranda while she goes about her day. We will also together construct voice messages sent from Miranda to Tyler, begging for him to answer and pick up the phone, creating that suspicion for the audience who are left wondering why he won’t answer her. To conclude the narrative, I will construct a newspaper article that leaves the fate of Miranda quite open to interpretation by the audience members.
This unresolved ending adds a final thriller aspect to our narrative genre. Neeve and I decided upon consultation with the panel of judges at the Pitch, that we would release snippets of information about the story in “instalments” over a span of days and weeks. We have decided to create a Tumblr page that is easy to navigate for audience members who can keep up as the story unfolds.
(Word Count – 506)