MElanie tells stories
Telling digital stories is pretty awesome.
This week we watched the film Catfish in class. It showed how people can use digital media to create new identities and new lives. The web can help to make different worlds and personalities. The women who was the catfish created many different people and almost a new world where she was the star.
We also got to choose social media accounts we follow and I chose people in Instagram like Shay Mitchell because she travels a lot and that is something I wish to do. I also chose Cosmo magazine on snap chat. This talks a lot about love and relationships. This is also something I am into reading about and finding out about. So these things gave me ideas for my final project for class. The things I care about that make people follow accounts like travel, love, and relationships. These could be turned into interactive stories which were my favorite things we did in class.
0 Comments
My vision for this project was to create a visual representation of how people always need to go home sometimes. I grew up in a place where a bunch of kids grew up together and all our parents grew up together. We are all pretty far apart now spreading across the country but I still got their favorite memories and some photos to go along with them that I had saved up. It just goes to show everyone needs a place they call home.
It was a very enjoyable thing to do especially having an excuse to talk about our childhood. My one friend went off to film school in Hollywood and we helped film his first movie here to get him in on our street. Things like these are the moments included in the project. Showing them now and in the past really helps reflect on how we have all grown and what we still think about. http://mel0495things.tumblr.com/ This week I chose the prompt which asked me to write down ten questions I have right now. Some of them were personal, not specific but personal. Some were questions probably anyone could answer but I still ask myself these questions daily. I think that everyone has questions they would like to ask and receive help with but are too afraid to ask and be judged in some way.
So my idea for making this digital is to create a place where people can all write down ten questions they have right now. This would probably be a tumblr of sorts. Then people take these questions and go find the answers and post them back to the original person. So while you are assigned someone else's question, someone is also answering your question. These could be simple questions like "why do I feel sick?" These could also be deeper questions like "Why do people stereotype my race?" The way to find these answers requires at least one photo and written response. I think the way people get their answers could be creative and change people's ways of thinking. This week I chose to do the page on 10 things you could've done but didn't. I think this is an awesome idea because plenty of people, probably almost everyone has at least a few things they regret not doing. So for this I was thinking of having people take the things they didn't do and writing them down. They then would take them out into the world to the place or person it involves and leave the paper there. Hopefully this would lead to them seeing the thing or person they missed out on and maybe following through with what they want.
I would maybe create an Instagram and call it " The things I never did" or something along those lines and collect pictures of people partaking in the activity. The location based aspect would be taking these things and doing them in these real locations in real time and making it digital. This would be a release of regret for many people. Just writing these things down for me was a relief and made me think of how easy it would be to just do some of the things that would make me happy. This week's journal entry chose was "Wrte a letter to someone you hate. Try to make them laugh." I thought this was the most creative idea to make digital. The anonymity of the internet would make this a perfect candidate for digital media. I wrote a letter about someone I do not really care for, who I was close to at one time. People could write their letters about anyone, without being vulgar of course, but they could vent and put it out there.
A Tumblr page would be pretty cool for this where threads can be created off other people's letters. I would title the blog "Dear No one, : Love, No one" and people could write letters to anyone and have them offered to be put up on the page. Other people would them comment their feelings and create threads off of each other, which would be interactive and possibly helpful. Another option which could work would be making a Instagram of these letters. It would be entitled the same thing but the letters would take more of a collage form. For my interactive narrative I chose to create a interactive version of the Bachelorette based off the hit TV show. I knew that this had potential to give user control and the illusion that you were actually picking a man you will end up with and going through the motions the real Bachelorette does. I could have done a version of the Bachelor however felt like more women would play my game so why not make the user in the game a woman looking for a man. So in order to enjoy my game you have to enjoy things like the TV show and romance. I wanted to make sure to add some comedy in there and I let them pick everything from what kind of food they eat to who they end up with in the end.
I wanted to make sure that there were multiple endings that users could get. f they all led to the same place, t would be less interesting. So depending on what motions you go through on the dates, you get a different version of the men which then leads each person to picking a man in the end. Whoever you pick in the end has a different story no matter what. Choose wisely. http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/cfm4 This week I chose to do the Barista tip jar wars entry from the journal! This one was different and a bit fun. To have people do this in a digital from would be interesting. To do this digitally you could use Twitter! There is a feature where you can create two options and people vote for their top pick. It goes for 24 hours and when time is up, you get the results anonymously. From these results you could then digitally post the champions and who would have gained the most tips! Also for this you could do something like "would you rather" where you physically choose your favorite and then the winner out of the two continues on and is against someone new for your pick. This would require something more interactive based from Twine or software like that. Miley Cyrus started out just as any other girl with big dreams of fame. She got her name on a popular show you might have heard of called Hannah Montana. She started the show at a young age of 12 and continued on with it until the age of 18 at which point Miley Stewart (Spoiler Alert) tells the world she is in fact Hannah Montana so that the show could end. Little did she know that what she was doing as Hannah and the songs she sang foreshadowed her post-Hannah years.
This is what our remix project proves: That no matter what she does or how hard she tries to stray away from her Hannah image, Hannah always knew. Ashley and I collaborated on this project and we started out with picking song lyrics and lining them up to fit well in a mashup form. Then we had to find images of Miley Cyrus post-Hannah where she was doing something which had to do with the lyrics from her old songs from the show. Using video and editing software this was possible with some time and willingness to listen to Hannah Montana songs on repeat for hours at a time. We ended up with something that does not give Miley a bad image but sort of reminds us all of how we cannot run away from who we used to be but rather we should embrace who we are now and how our past got us here. This is a selective remix where we chose things we specifically wanted for the project. The purpose is to persuade in a way that Hannah knew what was coming even if Miley tries to run away from her past self. The struggles we encountered were how many songs to use, which images to show (Miley has had many not so pretty pictures), and simply how to string them together so our point gets across. Overall, we worked well together and got to work on something we enjoyed while being a little nostalgic that Hannah really is gone. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0IEBAAhFcGwbWs2NE8yQi1XbWM/view
This week I chose a page where it told me to draw out my map for the week. When I first began I thought it would be larger than it turned out. In the summer it would probably be larger but during the school year it appears to be nothing but home, school, and work.
So then I began to think that it would be awesome to see everyone else's maps of their weeks. Local or world wide. This could be digitally done with Google Maps. This would create maps a lot larger than mine and more widespread than mine. Something else cool to see locally would be where you may collide with people on a daily basis that you did not even know about. World wide it would just be interesting to see all the places around the world people get to see everyday. It could be anonymous so it would not cause any risks for anyone. I do not feel like it would be difficult to get people on board for an idea like this. It could be good for everyone. |