Tag Archives: StoryLabRMIT

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 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 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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Project Brief 1: Case study of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

In the age of post-broadcast television, the concept of ‘complex narratives’ became increasingly popular in the 1990’s as TV shows began to move on from episodic formats, as seen in sitcoms and soap operas, into sophisticated storytelling better known as ‘quality TV’. Shows such as The Sopranos and other HBO branded programmes (“it’s not TV, it’s HBO”) were at the forefront of this movement. In the rise of ‘quality TV’ programmes, the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired in the U.S in 1997. The concept of the show was adapted from the 1992 film of the same name by it’s creator Joss Whedon. What made BtVS stand out from other ‘quality TV’ programmes of this era was it’s unique ability to remix so many different conventions from genres such as horror, comedy, teen-drama, action adventure, just to name a few, creating its own ‘mega-mix’ as well as its use of transmedia story-telling, leading it to create the intricate story-world that is known as the ‘Buffyverse’.

The concept of ‘remixing’ is evident throughout the narrative of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. First of all it’s initial idea is an adaptation of the ‘vampire’ story, which has been remixed throughout different forms of media since the 1800’s. Yet BtVS does not always follow the predictable conventions of a horror story (like one involving vampires) would usually follow, a great example of this being the character Buffy herself. Physically her appearance is one of the most predictable cliches of the horror genre, the pretty blonde girl who is killed in the first act. But Whedon changes the game by remixing this archetypal character, explaining that idea was to “…create someone who was a hero where she had always been a victim” (Whedon, 2001).

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The show’s ability to remix conventions from many genres, in particular its combination of ‘teen drama’ and ‘horror’, set it apart from any show at the time and still stands to this day. As explored in Laura Suitsted’s essay Breaking Conventions to Build the Buffyverse, the show’s early seasons prominently make use of the metaphor that ‘High-school is hell’, a well known trope to the teen genre. But Whedon remixes this idea by making it far more literal, that high school is hell with real monsters in fact. An example of this is the episode The Pack, where the main ‘pack’ of bullies at Sunnydale high become possessed with the spirit of a cruel hyenas and then literally prey on the weak students by eating them. Or the episode Witch, when Buffy befriends a girl named Amy in cheerleading tryouts who is under intense pressure from her mother, a former head cheerleader in her day, to make the squad. After failing to make the team, it is revealed the mother is a witch who switched bodies with her daughter, saying that Amy was wasting her youth, so she took it for herself, which no doubt is an unique take on the pressures of being a teen.

Buffy Season 8

Buffy Season 8

Whedon’s ability to create the in-depth story world that is the ‘Buffyverse’, is aided by his use of transmedia storytelling. The story of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was continued on in the spin-off series Angel, which followed the character of Angel and his backstory, an important part of the Buffy story-world. BtVS lasted till season 7 but Whedon continued the story on to a graphic novel titled Buffy Season 8. All of these forms of media that depict world of the Buffyverse work because they all follow the ‘coherent set of rules within the universe in which the story takes place’ (Suisted, 2005).  The result of this combined with its remixing of genre is what lead BtVS to its massive cult following as well as an accredited academic field, which both stand strong till this day.

 

References:
– DVD Episode Commentary “Welcome To The Hellmouth” Buffy The Vampire Slayer. 20th Century Fox: Whedon, Joss, 2001.

– Suisted, Laura. (2005). Breaking Conventions to Build the Buffyverse. Available: http://www.watcherjunior.tv/01/suisted.php. Last accessed 15th Mar 2015.