In our tutorial today for Story lab, the theme of linearity continued, as well as a chance to further breakdown and delve into new understandings of creating and breaking down story. This class had us performing two group work activities. One where we took a well known story and began to map it out visually, in the form of graphs. The other had has playing a card game, where we were to select certain cards at random to create a story using character, time, place, profession and action.

Task 1:

Graphing out our story of choice ” Little Red Riding Hood ” we looked at;

1. Emotional intensity- Measuring us the audience on our emotional levels and how we feel during the progression of the story.
2. Character Journey- Which follows the events of particular characters and their events throughout the story.
3. Themes- The themes prevalent in the story and measuring what percentage each plays
4. ??- The last was a graph of our own choosing

Graphs:

What I found really interesting about all of this was the ability to breakdown stories that we all know and formulate them into these linear graphs that tracks not only the high and low points of a particular story, but also individual character emotions and course of events. This was an interesting and almost ‘clinical’ way to look at that of what was once seemed a creative story. That is not to say that this formula isn’t creative, I personally think it is the perfect way to track events and audience engagement with a story. By having us calculate a story in this manner you are able to see where things can be added or changed to best achieve the themes, character journey, emotional intensity or in the case off our 4th graph we created ‘ characters portraying those themes’ you have set out for your story.

Task 2

Task 2 had has set up a card game, the stack contained;

2 x Time cards, 2 x Place cards, 3 x Character cards, 3 x Profession cards and 3 x Action cards. These cards where then set up to play over two scenes. From the cards drawn at random our story was created.

The Queen Elizabeth, who is also a psychiatrist sits at home in Buckingham Palace watching television with Henry who is a Monarch. The two see a ad for a Bowling alley centre and with Elizabeths birthday coming up Harry decided to organise a surprise birthday party for the Queen. He decided to meet the owner of the bowling alley Holly incognito at dawn on a bridge away from the viewing public and paparazzi, to organise the party plans.

The story ” though silly’  almost create itself through the simplistic task. Picking these cards at random helped us to formulate a linear story, without having to dwell on place, characters, times…. After receiving those basic bits of information the story came naturally and almost showed how trivial a profession or action can completely shape every film you’ve ever seen or every story you’ve ever read.

These tasks both helped me begin the process of creating my own short story for later this week. All that is needed is a bit more fine tuning and ill be ready to go.