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‘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)

Week 6 – Prepping the pitch!

This week in class we had time to work on our pitch presentations for next week. In preparation for “Dodging the Bullet”, Neeve and I constructed the fake profiles of our main characters and established a more definite plot to our own cat-fishing tale. We developed these social media profiles so that we could not only create a Facebook account, but also develop a sample media for our pitch. We hope to creates that lifelike aspect to these people who don’t actually exist by filling their profiles with pictures and things that make them seem like any other teenager.

Dan raised an question with us that we will probably be asked in our pitch. How does our story differentiate from the TV show Catfish? What makes it different? We believe that our story is unlike Catfish in the sense that the TV show gives a definite closure to the situation. They follow up with video conversations with both sides of the catfishing story, and summarise “where they are now” with on screen text. For our story, we want there to be this sort of “unknown” at the end, with the disappearance of our main character, Miranda.

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With our fake profiles now constructed, Neeve and I are now in charge of assembling the Facebook Profiles for each of our characters and we need to begin to construct conversations between the two of them. Today Neeve also worked with Quicktime Screen Record to take snippets of Tyler constructing his fake profile.

Let the adventures begin!

 

Week 5 – Essay Reflection

1. Your chosen prompt

Music can move us, inspire us, transform us. Is it the purest mode of storytelling? Provide an in-depth analysis of either one piece of music or one album in answering this question.

2. How you decided on your approach

I wanted to select music that had interest to me, and music that I loved. I wasn’t going to explore music that didn’t personally move me. I knew that if it was an artist I loved I’d feel more inclined to research more and enjoy the writing more.

3. Where you started I started

I started by watching a documentary on John Mayer, and learning about his life to understand where the meanings and ideas behind the songs on the continuum album might have come from.

4. Anything new/unexpected you found

I found out endless amounts of information about John Mayer. His views on war, life, death etc. It was fascinating to hear about his life.

5. Your overall findings/arguments

It is pure in the sense that it is heard from the voice of artist themselves. Whether it is the most pure or not, is purely subjective to the way people enjoy to absorb information (pictures, sound, words etc). Continuum is a heartfelt album that tells the stories of war, love, and keeping yourself humble.

Throughout this experience I have learnt a lot about storytelling. After presenting my work in class, I learnt places where I could have uncovered more about my own essay, such as Dan’s suggestion to look at the Continuum album as a whole, focusing on the highs and lows of the tracks. It was interesting to hear from others who had also done the music essay question. Despite feeling slightly intimidated by the amount of information they had learnt about a more broad study of narrative through music I really enjoyed hearing different perspectives. I was interested in the “music therapy” idea, because that is a strong focus of the purity that is music. It is all about using music as some kind of therapy, or outlet for the artists and audiences emotions. I found it interesting how I worded my findings quite differently when I was retelling it as a response to the class, which makes me think it’s probably a good idea to convey it to a member of my family or someone when writing my essay to think of things differently.

Week 1

Storytelling. It is something we do almost every day, whether it be something funny we saw on the weekend, or something completely made up. Every story is open, and what I learnt in class this week, the first week of the semester, is that stories don’t have to follow a particular path or structure, typically, the three act structure with a beginning, middle and end. When I think of the word “story” I think of fact or fiction, a plot, a narrative, and some sort of resolution to conflict that arises throughout the story. I think what fascinated me about class this week was looking at the unconventional structure of stories, that audiences are taken on throughout the characters journey. The way audiences yield expectation that for every problem there will be a solution is something that drives me as a writer to push those boundaries and force audience members to be left wondering. As much as it left me begging for a sequel or explanation, this “unfinished” feeling left me full of wonder when watching what I would now regard as my favourite film – The Shining. The ending of the film depicts something that is still to this day something I can’t understand despite how many internet articles I have read on it. I even went as far as to watch a documentary called Room 237, elaborating on the thought processes behind the directorial genius Stanley Kubrick. Even then, there is little explanation. I guess I will forever be on the pursuit for an explanation.

Before class this week we were asked to watch a TED talk video, hosted by Filmmaker Andrew Stanton, one of the creative geniuses behind “Toy Story” and “WALL-E”, and he shards what he knows about storytelling. The entire talk by Stanton introduced many concepts, one of which was “wonder”, the concept I touched on above about “making you think about what was seen”. Stanton also raised the idea that “Stories are inevitable, if they’re good, but they’re not predictable”. I think this is an important point for any good storywriter attempting to construct a conclusion to their narrative – they must work with some sort of climax, but yet still seek that same “wonder” aspect that makes stories so enjoyable.

One thing that I didn’t agree with in Stanton’s speech was making the main character likeable. I can understand from his perspective that as an employee of Pixar, he wants to create “kind, generous, funny and considerate” characters to create a heart-warming story full of morals and lessons for younger children, but in more adult fiction, it is simply unnecessary. To draw from another in-class reference this week, the characters in Frankenstein, particularly the “monster” himself, is depicted as a bad figure, similarly his creator is not a “good” person but the novel/movie revolves around the idea of “what really makes someone/something a monster?”. Finding the deeper reason as to why the characters aren’t inherently “good natured” allows the audience to expand their knowledge of the role of a villain protagonist.

Confession time

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Okay I must confess, i’ve been a bad student. I have missed the past three Networked Media classes. I can somewhat justify it, I mean, I just started a new job and they’ve had me working throughout the duration of my Networked class and I feel guilty asking to change shifts so soon into my employment.

Nevertheless, in my quite hectic schedule i’ve been keeping up with this class, the major essay assignment and attending symposiums. I was sitting in class today, for Communication Histories & Technologies, listening to a group’s speech and they brought up that one time Facebook crashed for nothing more than half an hour, and how people were ringing the police, and directly calling Facebook HQ because they felt so “out of the loop”. That’s kind of how I feel right now. On the other hand, I also feel there’s endless possibility for me to catch up by reading into my peers work and reflections. Ah, the beauty of blogging.