Monthly Archives: May 2015

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!

 ☆*:.｡. o(≧▽≦)o .｡.:*☆

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!!!

 ☆*:.｡. o(≧▽≦)o .｡.:*☆

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

 ☆*:.｡. o(≧▽≦)o .｡.:*☆

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.

 ☆*:.｡. o(≧▽≦)o .｡.:*☆

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.

☆*:.｡. o(≧▽≦)o .｡.:*☆