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.
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.
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.
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
