The Story Lab 2016 – Blog Post Week Ten

Carrying on with our major assignments, this week was all about working on The Barlow Enquiry. As a whole, I think the narrative is coming along well, and as a group, we’re tying up some loose ends that have been worrying us  in the past couple of weeks.

Through the course of this week some of the major things we’ve been focussing on surround:
– Cross checking our character stories, including birth dates and death dates, making sure they all fit into the narrative correctly
– Hashing out our timeline. We’ve been using a Google Doc (we love the Google Doc’s) to pinpoint when and where we want media released. Through this, we’re also using this document to nominate particular members of the group to do certain tasks. This keeps us from doubling up and a solid track record of who’s doing what and when.

While we’ve obviously been tinkering in other areas of our project, for this week, these have been our main focuses. In saying that, Aidan and I have taken on the responsibility of completing the projects posters to be distributed around campus. Thanks to a couple of Skype meetings (bless you internet), we’ve been able to create posters that have a solid sense of continuity and solid structure; media which is identifiable as a product of The Barlow Enquiry.

Realising that our characters would be the strongest selling point of our project (and that audiences are more likely to identify with characters than they are of events of 1901) we decided that the best way to tackle this aspect of the assignment was to create a range of posters that focused on one particular character each. From the get go, we were also certain that we didn’t want to give audiences too much information, or send them into information overload. Rather, we wanted to tease the audiences by giving them just enough information to work out this was a murder case, but not enough that they knew what was going on completely. We’re hoping that this will be enough to entice audiences to follow the links. As I stated, the posters, though created by the two of us, will be identical except for the characters and the wording related to the particular character. This way, if you’re strolling around campus and happen to notice a few of the posters, you know they’re all related.

I’ve mentioned continuity a few times because, for me, it’s a really important aspect of any project. As much as people don’t like to admit it; if something is visually pleasing, they are more likely to be persuaded to become an audience. Because of this, I’ve been really focused on creating identifiable and unwavering aspects between the social media account such as Facebook, Twitter and the WordPress blog. Let’s hope it all pays off!