Category Archives: The Story Lab

The Story Lab: OVERALL LAB REFLECTIONS ! ! !

The end of Story Lab is here! What an interesting experience it has been.
First of all, I just want to say a big thank you to Dan, for being such an awesome teacher! I really did enjoy this media lab and I appreciate the hard work Dan put into it!

When I first enrolled into this subject, my impression was that it would be more focused on screenwriting even though I don’t think it said anything remotely like that in the course description…that was just me jumping to conclusions.
But I liked how it actually turned out to be! The concept of transmedia storytelling is really fascinating to me and I definitely feel I have a much better understanding of the theories behind in looking back at the end of the semester.

The group project was a really fun (and also tiring) experience. I am very grateful that my group happened to be full of such awesome people! I don’t think I would have survived if I didn’t along with my team members as well as we all did with this project, everyone in the group really needed to be a team player in order to pull it off and I think we worked great as a team. I hope it was the same experience for the rest of my classmates!
The amount of work outside of class was more than I expected but like I said in a previous post, that was mostly my persuasion to make my group members meet outside of class (which I know alot of students are very hesitant to do) but being the awesome people they are, they were always happen to work on it! and we always had snacks and lollies, who doesn’t love snacks and lollies!
I think another thing that was very lucky about our group is that we were all on the same page, in terms of humor and creativity. So we were able to collaborate really well in the ideas process.

I think our transmedia project was creative and is very relevant to todays society of social media addicts. The actually process of telling the narrative was like I said, pretty tiring, but an interesting experience. And it was pretty fun creating a fake ‘real’ person online. I hope the story is as enjoyable as we set out for it to be. I am looking forward to hearing the feedback.

I think what I will be able to take away from The Story Lab is a new way to look at marketing screen projects and captivating audiences. Who knows what I will work on in the future but I think I will definitely be able to look at in a new perspective.

Overall I really enjoyed The Story Lab! Thanks again Dan!

Here is one last picture of Kylie Jenner for you…

Bye Emily

Bye Emily!!

The Story Lab: Week 12 Reflections

Here we are…the last week of our PROJECT INSTAFAME !!!!!!!!!

This week has been an interesting one indeed. In our final Tuesday meeting (again a very productive session) as a group we suddenly had a eureka moment and realised where the story needed to go. This was brought on by our realisation of the role Instagram in Emily’s story.

While although Instagram does help build Emily’s character by depthening her thoughts through another social media platform, it is not really playing the part we wanted it to initially play when planning out our story. What we original wanted for Instagram to be the ‘perfectly curated life’ that she would want others to see her by but we realised this week that it hasn’t really been achieving that at all and I believe this is mainly to do with the fact our main characters image is taken from a screenshot of youtube, we don’t have the real person to be able to take photos that we needed put that as the content on our Instagram.

Ideally perhaps maybe if we had hired an actor look alike or a friend of ours, we could have taken a series of very ‘self-obessed’ photos and continually be posting those throughout the days of our narrative but unfortunately this was not the case and we came to the group that pretty much our use of Instagram is easily a throw away and is really not as essentially to the story anymore but….

We knew we had to make up for this loss somehow and as a group we decided to incorporate the use of facebook pages, I am unsure if my other group members have said exactly what this facebook page is as it would spoil the ending of the story, so I will just avoiding saying exactly what is on the page!! But now that we decided to bring this new transmedia element in, it has worked out so perfectly for us as it gives our spectator a clear ending point and also ties up a lot of loose ends about the story the audience may have been puzzled or curious by. So I am really happy that as a group we came to this awesome idea! The ending also concludes our the theme of online desperation and teenages obessive behaviour of getting gratification from actions such as a ‘like’ on facebook, in a dark but also realistic kind of way.

I must say I am very interested to hear the feedback of our project!! I think it is an engaging story and hopefully our audiences do as well!

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The Story Lab: Week 11 Reflections

So it is now the end of Week 2 of Project Instame!! …and things are running relatively smoothly!

I have been on a emotional rollercoaster in regards to my overall feelings of our transmedia project. At the start of this week, to be honest I wasn’t feeling very confident about our project! I couldn’t help but feel that Project Instafame wasn’t strong enough in regards of the story or even trans-media enough (if thats a thing?). Although we had all the content planned to an extent for the week and were still in the process finding images to reblog for Emily’s tumblr to reiterate the ‘between the lines’ messages we were foreshadowing…I still didn’t feel completely 100% about it!! I think this was because I hadn’t seen enough content through our social media’s to feel like there was a story yet….

But these worrying feelings were soon gone by Tuesday thanks to my awesome group! I must say, I got to hand it to them, I somehow managed to make them to commit to a weekly Tuesday afternoon meeting to work on our project outside of class! this may have been because I seduced them with lollies and snacks….but seriously they have been really great team members to work with. In this weeks Tuesday session we were super productive and it was fantastic!! Made me feel a 1000 times more confident about everything again and now that it is the end of the week and Emily’s tumblr has been posting away, I am really starting to see how the story is forming and I think it’s fantastic!

But now the next challenge is…the final week of our transmedia narrative!!!

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The Story Lab: Week 10 Reflections

Here we are!! Week 10 of the semester and Project Instafame has launched….
We are currently in week 1 of the narrative and our main character Emily is in full flight on her various social media platforms!
As a group we are definitely beginning to realise the amount of organisation and planning it is needed to take to keep this narrative flowing coherently but overall I think we are pretty on top of things.

Fortunately our main platform in the story, Tumblr, has the fantastic option to be able to queue posts. Although it is not the most user friendly function, it stil enables us as a group to be able to sit down and plan each post together and send it off into the queue, so we are able to focus on Emily’s other platforms such as Instagram which annoyingly require precise organisation as each post must be posted on the day in order to sync up to our planned timeline.

Although the narrative has been planned out and each major plot point in the story has a specific date, we are still open to the narrative being able to change and evolve as we continue to post through Emily and we have already found better ways to tweak the narrative to be more engaging. Already after seeing a couple days of Emily’s posts already out there in the internet is making me feel a lot more confident of our project overall and I think that the message behind it is relevant to society today and I hope those who experience our transmedia project in its entirety feel the same way too.

Social media impact

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The Story Lab: Week 9 Reflections

So the reading we looked at this week,titled Signs, Systems and Complexity  of Transmedia Storytelling by Renira Rampazzo Gambarato, was pretty hard to digest…actually it was extremely hard to digest. In saying that, there were a lot of parts that did make sense to me when Gambarato directly related the theories to storytelling and transmedia storytelling….but my goodness when the equations got involved, my brain just said goodnight and switched off.

I feel this quote is quite relevant to my groups transmedia project, and probably all groups in fact..

‘A fundamental aspect of TS yet is the relationship between the story and people interested in it, which could correspond to the essential relationship between the constituent elements of a system and its environment’ (Gambarato, 2012 p.74).

Gambarato goes further to explain Henry Jenkins concept of ‘performance’, that being in order to gain a relationship with the audience, interactivity and participation are key elements to achieve this. Gambarato does note that these two terms are different, as an interactive project ‘allows the audience to relate to it somehow, for instance, by pressing a button or control, deciding the path to experience it, but not being able to co-create and change the story’ and a participatory project invites ‘viewers/users/players to engage in a way that expresses their creativity in a unique, and surprising manner, allowing them to influence the final result’ (Gambarato, 2012 p.74).

When reflecting on my groups transmedia story project, Project Instafame, it is evident that our project falls into the first category mentioned, being a interactive project. My worry at this stage is that the story is engaging enough for an audience to want to navigate through to the final instalment and I know I am not the only one thinking this in my group, perhaps a topic for discussion in our next group meeting.

me

Me reading Signs, Systems and Complexity of Transmedia Storytelling by Renira Rampazzo Gambarato.

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The Story Lab: Week 8 Reflections

This week nothing was set in class, so we had the chance to work away at our Transmedia final assignment, Project Instafame.
At this point in time we are still wrapping our heads around the story and how it will be dispersed through our different social media platforms.
We have started to draft up a rough timeline on butchers paper, in order to visualise the actual timeline of events and also fill in the gaps between the significant moments in Emily’s life.

Our group has decided to set up a meeting outside of class, as well as using class time next week to kick off the narrative of Emily’s tumblr posts. Fortunately thanks to Tumblr, there is a function that enables users to que up as many posts as they like and schedule them for when the user wishes it to be posted. As a group we plan to have all Emily’s tumblr posts finished and scheduled through the tumblr, so each team member can focus on her other social media profiles as the real time events play out over the three week narrative.
This will be the main priority for this coming week.

I am really looking forward to getting our story started, I look forward to depthing the character of Emily and making her seem as believable as possible. I think it will be an really interesting experience.

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Project Brief 3: PITCHES

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

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.

Screen Shot 2015-04-09 at 3.43.34 pm

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The Story Lab: Week 7 Reflections

This week in the Story Lab, our project team was full speed ahead in preparing for our third project brief. The project, now titled ‘instafame’, was presented by my team members and myself in front of a panel of four lecturers and the rest of the class.

It was an really interesting process watching each group get up infront of everyone and how they went about there presentation. I must say I was really impressed with the creative ideas each group had come up with for their transmedia story. It was also fascinating to see the different prototypes from each group, some groups had already prepared footage or even filmed teaser trailer, other groups had created functioning websites, it was awesome!

I feel pretty positive about my groups presentation, we got all of the information across and it seemed clear and coherent enough to our panel members. Something that has always been a problem for myself is public speaking, so hopefully I personally did not speak to fast or stutter over words in my portion of the presentation. Overall the experience did help me in terms of getting confidence in a situation like that as maybe someday I will find myself in that place again, presenting in front of a panel.

instagram-followers-description-1

Now for project ‘instafame’ to kick into motion!!

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The Story Lab: Week 6 Reflections

So this week we had a guest speaker, Dr Troy Innocent from Swinburne University! Troy talked about to us Alternate Reality Games and his game he created that was played in Melbourne and Sydney. It was interesting hearing how players participated and how hard it was to draw audiences.
ARG’s are very impressive but they seem like so much hard work!! I hope one day I participate in an ARG!!

Stolen from (or remixed) Dan's Twitter, https://twitter.com/DrDanielBinns/status/588576556227776513/photo/1

Stolen from (or remixed) Dan’s Twitter, https://twitter.com/DrDanielBinns/status/588576556227776513/photo/1

The Story Lab: Week 5 Reflections

In this weeks class, we all took turns to present our argument that we explored throughout our Assignment 2: Research Report.

It was great to hear everyone’s thought process and what they ended up debating in their essays. The topic question I choose for my essay, was ‘The viral campaign for 2008’s The Dark Knight was incredibly innovative for its time. Is it, though, an example of transmedia storytelling?’. There was a number of other students that choose this topic question as well, so when it came to going around the room to discuss how we individually approached our essays, it was really interesting to hear the different perspectives on whether the viral campaign was an example of transmedia storytelling and how each individual argued their point.

Dan also asked us to write in this weeks blog post, our new philosophy of storytelling, that is based on the research you did….so my new philosophy is everything is a story! No matter how it’s told, everything tells a story. There are no limits or rules to storytelling, it can be displayed through so many mediums! I know that probably sounds very ambiguous but it’s very hard to define something as massive as the idea of storytelling I believe….so that is my philosophy.

See you in next weeks blog!! haazzarrr!

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