Have a look at our Google Map Narrative HERE
Before Christmas, we were given the brief for our next assignment, which was to use the tools from Google Maps to tell a story. This narrative could be fictional or factual and could be told in either a linear or non-linear structure.
Included in our brief was the location that would be the beginning of our story, ours was the Pier Head in Liverpool. The students that I worked with in this project were Josie Webster, Emma Moreton and Pete Edwardson.
After a brainstorm of possible ideas, we decided to create a non-linear crime thriller, about the last weeks in the life of a solicitor, Christopher Kemp, who was found murdered at the Pier Head. After deciding the narrative, we then created a series of locations that would be shown through a Google Map. On clicking each location, information on a different suspect to Christopher’s murder, was presented within its narrative.
Our first week consisted of deciding which locations would be used for the story, what motive each character would have for killing Christopher and choosing the character names. The process of the character creation was both interesting and fun. The fun aspect was from creating extreme characters, such as Christopher’s mistress, Chelsea Pierson, who was also the young, trophy wife of Tony Pierson, Christopher’s boss. It was also interesting because we assigned stereotypical roles for the characters that were needed for this kind of narrative. Much like putting the right pieces together in one large puzzle.
We used a random name generator to create names for the characters and was quite an entertaining process, as the names seemed to really fit with the characters. A good example of this would be the mistress, Chelsea Pierson. Once our characters had names and we planned the story, we started to create email accounts for the characters and a blog for Christopher Kemp.
We wanted to try and make the world of this story as believable as possible, so we decided to use fake emails and blog posts to tell the story, this way the story is being told by the characters themselves.
I really enjoyed this assignment, as I felt that we could be more creative with our stories and there were little restrictions for the creation of our narrative. I feel that we may have made the story too big and perhaps too complicated. If we had more time we could have worked more on the story, but other than that I felt that the project went very well.
I think the method of using Google Map as a narrative tool to be a great technique to practice one’s storytelling abilities. Perhaps it can be used as a tool to plan the story of a novel or a film, which I may use. In the future I may use this to plan out my next short film or I may try to create another Google Map narrative.
