As I sit in the living room of my home back in Northern Ireland, I look back and found that a lot has happened in the last few weeks since I posted anything, so I feel it is time for another catch up post.
Paparazzi Game:
In the last post, I talked about the experience of creating a game called Paparazzi, where a group of people are hunted by a photographer who's identity is a mystery to them. James Dunn and myself created a Prezi Presentation to try and sale the game to the class, which you can watch by clicking HERE
The presentation went very well, as our game was voted the best by the rest of the class. I was really happy with the result and really enjoyed working with James Dunn. Not only was he focused on the task and provided great contribution to the creation of the game, but he made the process very enjoyable and I would work with him again anytime.
I am still working on the video for the Paparazzi Game, so hopefully that will be done sometime after Christmas.
Narrative:
The last Tuesday morning session we had before Christmas was a "tutorial" on the next assignment. The assignment is to create a narrative with google maps, by placing five points and within these points, there will be different media artefacts that will tell the story. These artefacts can be anything from text to short video clips.
For a practice run, our tutors split us into groups of three to four and gave us two pieces of paper. One of these was a sentence that was to be our first point of our story and the other was a location within the Screen School. I was in a group with fellow Northern Irishman, Josh McDowell and Lois Bunker. Our story was to begin with this sentence: "The building was on fire and it wasn't my fault." Our location was the Screen School cafe. With these two pieces of paper, we set out to think of a story to be told in four other parts.
We could have devised a comedy from the sentence, but we felt that this would be too obvious. So we quickly thought of a more supernatural means of the building's fire. In short the narrative story was about a poltergeist hunting the Screen School and the four parts of the story represented the journey a character was following to find out more about the building's hunting.
We decided to try and make the narrative more interactive, so that people would feel that they are taking part of the story. We used a few media tools for our narrative, such as using my Facebook profile to establish the ghostly events going on in the building and using my digital voice recorder, to act out the character's last moments before being disappeared.
My favourite part was when we led the class into the green screen room, where they found torn pieces of paper that they had to bring together to find out more about the story. The room was perfect, as we put the lights out and only turned them on when everyone was inside, thus creating more of an atmosphere.
I found it quite strange how creating these Narrative experiences was much more fun than walking through one. I do hope people enjoyed ours, but I felt that a lot was not explained in the end and perhaps not too many really got that a poltergeist was after the character, but I do felt that they enjoyed the experience.
I enjoyed working with Lois and Josh, we all really clicked and came up with great ideas for the story. As always I continue to think of more ideas for that experience. I am looking forward to this assignment, I really enjoyed the experience and also the idea of bringing different media artefacts together to tell a story.
Ideas for the New Year
Well other than the tasks for University, I hope to create more films, such as for the It's Liverpool competition and the reed.co.uk film competition. I always wanted to see how well I can fare in a film competition. I am also hoping to create more short videos with James Dunn and James McKeown, as we really enjoyed working together and felt that our last video was very successful.
I also hope to write some more and perhaps work on a serious film or two. Another ambition is to take on a photograph a day project for the new year, which I hope I decide to go for. The experience may very well kill me, but I feel that I can achieve it and it will really increase my photography skill. So as Christmas day draws near I shall end this post in wishing everyone I know and met a wonderful Christmas. I hope everyone can celebrate in their own way that we are now half way out of the dark.
