The story of Emily Doee is a dark satire of the widespread obsession with internet fame or better yet, ’instafame’. The story is inspired by the superficial and edited nature of the internet, which has become the norm in this day and age. Teenagers feel the need for gratification in ‘likes’ , anonymous validation and it makes you wonder that surely this has a dangerous effect on self-esteem and self-worth, yet it seems to be embraced so intensely by naive inexperienced youth. Through our character of Emily, we want to show an extreme caricature of the online lives of attention-starved teenagers. By taking this story to the extreme, we hope to highlight how absurd this culture really is.
Emily’s idol, Kylie Jenner
The video of Brendan Jordan, that inspired the project is a perfect example of this notion of ‘instafame’ and the urge for teens to feel important through validation on the internet. Which is why I personally love that we have chosen essentially a ‘nobody’ to base our whole project around from a viral video that actually made a kid (Brendan Jordan) internet famous and has become a somewhat mini celebrity, modelling for American Apparel and having a very successful youtube channel.
Through the different social media platforms of Tumblr, Instagram and Qoome, we want to develop a believable and life-like presence of a teenage girl that is creating herself a new online identity. We also want the audience to take on the role as someone wasting time online, ‘stalking’ someone for personal entertainment and sick self indulgent pleasure.
Each different social media plays a important part in the overall story of Emily Doee as each will represent a different version of Emily. Instagram being the perfectly curated life of Emily, Tumblr being the personal thoughts and emotions expressed to anyone that will listen and Qoome, a platform for people in Emily’s life to be express there feelings towards her, putting her in the context of the world around her. By using these multiple social media profiles, the audience will have to guide themselves through each new content posted to understand the full transmedia narrative of Emily Doee.
I also want to note a point that was not covered in the pitch earlier this week, the use of the ‘remix’ theory will be prominent throughout the content in our transmedia narrative. All images used will be found images as well as other various internet content, and by using tools such as ‘reblog’ on Tumblr. We will be appropriating each content to fit within Emily’s portrayal of her life, which is very typical in this internet day and age, as anything can be used and uncredited. Which includes the character Emily herself, we chose her ‘image’ from a video found on the internet and is now the face of the whole project.
Within the group we made the executive decision to share each of the job roles, with a rotating roster each week. Since we are dealing with three different social media platforms, each week a member of the group will be assigned to one of Emily’s different social media profiles and will be responsible for maintaining the content that is posted, in order to keep up the facade of a real girl updating her social media in real time. The group decided upon this decision in order to keep the work load between team members fair and balanced as due to the nature of the different profiles, some may be a lot more work than others and would be unfair if it was not rotated between each members evenly.
As a group in the planning process of creating the character Emily, we decided upon a set list of topics, interests and inspirations that are key to Emily as a character, as well a list of dislikes and pet peeves. This resulted in the creation of our ‘bible of Emily’. By doing this, any team member will be able to logon to any of Emily’s social media accounts, refer back to the bible of Emily and post or reblog content that is not only appropriate and faithful to the character of Emily (something that she would post), but also crucial to the overall transmedia that is being told.
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