1. What is the essential story behind the piece you created?
The essential story is that sometimes the most effective way
to communicate is indirectly, through empathy and emotions, and without head-on
logic. It is a frustrating yet fascinating fact to me, and it is really at the
core of my passion for media psychology and communications. Telling and reliving
this story helps me reconnect to that passion and explain it to others, in no
small part since it is through story that others can imagine and (I hope)
empathize with. Since I also plan on being a science popularizer when I get my
PhD (like Carl Sagan, whose own storytelling influenced me to be a scientist) I
know I will be sharing this story for many years to come.
2. What was your purpose in creating this piece of new media
narrative? Do you feel you were successful in communicating your purpose?
Ostensibly I created this piece to satisfy the course requirement.
But it also gave me a chance to practice the theory that I learned in the Story
Paper that was also due for this class. By design the paper was supposed to
come last but I did things out-of-order because I wanted to get what I
considered the harder assignment out of the way. In practice however it gave me
a chance to demonstrate (what I believe) is my better understanding of story
theory now, an understanding I don’t believe I would have had had I not had to
examine it so closely first in the paper. It also provides a nice “before
theory paper” to “after theory paper” comparison to the first and second media
projects. That said, I think I was successful in communicating my intent in
creating the piece, as well as some of the fun I had in making it.
3. Who was your audience? Do you feel you were successful in
reaching your audience?
In truth my audience is Dr. Ohler, the course instructor.
Since I took an “Incomplete” for the class it is probably too late for my other
classmates from the summer to look at my project. And as it is I will probably
take this blog down soon after I get my grade. Although I do plan on soon
publishing a professional website showcasing my new found (and to be found)
professional skills I don’t want the inferior quality of the audio narration to
reflect on me.
In practice however, this is just the latest expression of a
story I have told for years (to many audiences) and will continue to tell. As
in every re-telling I believe I have learned something new about the story and
myself, particularly since I was able to incorporate visual and musical
elements into a story that I had always told orally or in writing. And that’s
what I find fun about media psychology – I love studying and applying the way
different media filter and accentuate human communication, both separately and
in conjunction.
4. Why did you use your particular approach to media
production and media selection? Were you successful?
As noted in the description of my piece, it was mainly time
and the hardware that I had on hand that dictated how I produced the piece. I
would imagine that my old broadcasting professors would cringe at some of the
pacing decisions I made. Plus when I recorded my piece I thought I would be
able to edit the audio but my software (Windows Moviemaker 2.6) and/or level of
skill frustrated my attempts.
Luckily I believe that the point of the assignment was more
to demonstrate my understanding of storytelling theory and how to create an
effective story than it was to showcase technical skills. And that’s great –
I’m more of a theory person myself and have found that my strength is more in
explaining phenomena than actually creating them. In that sense I believe I
succeeded. In particular I think stating the moral of the story at the end
communicated the “transformation” that took place in the main character
(myself) well. And if there is one thing I will take away from this course it
is that an effective story must have a transformation.
5. What did you learn during the process of crafting your
media piece that you can use in creating future new media narrative?
I learned that I’m probably not as bad a producer as I
thought, especially with my new understanding of story theory. By having tools
like the story arc, the transformation, and the theme at my disposal to tie the
different elements of the story together I was able to find a lot more
available media than I had originally hoped. It allowed me to identify the
human universals, abundant in the image media in the Google and Bing search
engines that I used. And I had what I thought were some pretty abstract
concepts to generalize, such as describing visually the indirect communicative
process that occurred between myself and my client – and why it worked.
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