whatsagoin on

Important ramblings of a BCT student.

[aliucreativetech]

Amos Liu, presentation space.

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Amos Liu, sketched portrait of the character, Petre Bauser.

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Amos Liu, converted spud gun.

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Amos Liu, converted watergun.

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[aliucreativetech]

Transmedia Narratives 12 - Final

Unfortunately the original “audio interview” idea I had fell through. The audio quality was not good and the voice acting was quite amateurish. In the interest of time I decided to scrap this idea and stick with my original plan.

I painted this portrait based on a character I wrote for the wiki. The reason I chose this character is because there are actually wiki articles written by other users that have links to this character and I feel it will be a great example of the “network” between articles.

Guns completed with a shiny copper and gold finish.

Portrait framed up and hung.

Hopefully my concept’s physical representation will provide a clear look into the universe of World X!

[aliucreativetech]

Transmedia Narratives 11 - Creating Props

As was planned, I created a few feature items for my final presentation that would bring some wiki articles into the real-world through a physical representation. The space will be a gallery or museum of sorts.

I purchased a couple of toy guns and other miscellaneous objects to begin transformation. Here is a toy gun.

The first pass in painting the gun. Acrylic doesn’t stick to plastic as well as other surfaces so it’s important to paint over it multiple times.

Paint dried.

I used a dry-brush technique with white paint to create a “scratched” or “weathered” look.

To break up the colour scheme, I added a white that I plan to paint over with gold.

Same process with a different gun.

Some possible “shells” to add to the display.

This week has focused on getting these props ready for display. I retrieved some user-contributed wiki articles and used them as the base for these props.

[aliucreativetech]

Transmedia Narratives 10 - New Presentation Ideas

After discussing it over with my lecturer, she suggested that my presentation display be immersive in a way that rather than it being a museum exhibition, it should be a real-world exhibition, as in placing the audience on-location rather than having them view it from the “outside”.

I have considered this idea in relation to an “election” being held in the story-world and having the audience members entering a voting-booth style setup and to vote for who they want through posters, wiki articles and other things posted around. The resulting vote would then create a new article in the wiki in relation to who won the vote and how it affects the story-world.

However I have to carefully consider the space I have, which consists the single side of a wall. Another discussion with the lecturer is to have immediate feedback of the presentation. Since my setup may involve a voting process and then a reflection of changes later on, it may be more effective to have an immediate effect as a result of voting or some such.

As for my museum idea I haven’t yet completely gotten rid of it. I’ve had an idea involving soundscapes and “interviews” with the characters to give them life through audio. I remember listening to old interviews conducted during world war 2 in the museums which involved a headset and just listening. These were fascinating in the immersiveness as you weren’t watching a screen but instead had the audio and you could imagine the person speaking. The lack of visuals and the use of headphones I felt made it much more intimate of an experience and therefore more immersiveness.

[aliucreativetech]

Transmedia Narratives 9 - Story-World Issues

One of the major issues I’ve felt about is the gritty and realistic nature of my established world. Although I have a deep interest in this, other people may feel intimidated by the daunting task of keeping everything realistic and official-feeling.

I’ve done some retconning of articles to make it a lot more user-friendly and the tone has been shifted from gritty to a lot more ‘fantasy’. I believe with a more lighter tone people won’t fear contributing as much and hopefully will allow their creative side to show with a lot less strict story-world.

These changes will be documented in the next few days.

[aliucreativetech]

Transmedia Narratives 8 - Wiki networking

The nature of a wiki is networking articles like a web, with one article linking to multiple others therefore providing easy access for people to navigate to articles/topics they want to read more about.

It’s important that I understand the structure of a wiki and thus I’ve been going back to re-reading the wikis that I used to enjoy and understanding how they connect characters, settings, locations and events together.

The main difference between my wiki and the other wikis is that while the other wikis aim to be as informative as possible about the story-world, my wiki aims to have a contained narrative within the wiki itself and so I have to understand the linking between articles while at the same time connecting narratives together across them. There is kind of like a meta-narrative behind the articles. When you read a normal wiki about a novel or book, you get glimpses and references to the story that unfolds in the narrative, what this means is that basically from reading the articles you feel that there is a bigger picture out there behind the articles. I’ve taken this element and tried to craft it so that the story and history already exists and that by reading these articles the reader can feel and over-arching story no matter where they start from. This has proven a much more difficult task than intended but at the same time has been an extremely interesting process. When I’ve asked people about what kind of story they can get from reading specific articles and they tell me the narrative they feel is unfolding I have a good feeling of accomplishment that I’ve gotten the story across.

[aliucreativetech]

Transmedia Narratives 7 - Cultivating a community

This is by far the most challenging aspect of my project. Originally I had wanted to create a few wiki articles and then try to advertise my project and get people to contribute. I had approached a few communities such as reddit but unfortunately to break into these communities is not easy as a newcomer. This is made more difficult by not having a finished product and also a concept that at the moment has more ideas than proof.

Although I’m starting to have a solid foundation in terms of tone and setting of my world it still doesn’t feel like I have a solid basis on which everything else will be built on.

With this being the case I think that I will have to adjust my project and try to involve people in another way or try to streamline the process and have it ready for people to contribute by presentation time.

In terms of actual contribution thus far I have had a few friends write small articles to be put into the wiki and from my experience with them it seems that to write something from scratch is difficult for those who are not creatively inclined. I’ll ask them again to write something but this time I’ll have a few guidelines and stubs to expand on rather than giving them free reign on writing whatever they want. Hopefully with some guidance and direction people can find it easier to contribute.

[aliucreativetech]

Transmedia Narratives 6 - What to present?

Apart from the wiki side of my project I also had to think about what to actually present when it comes to summative. The idea I’ve come up with is the bring the wiki world into the real world in the form of a diorama or a section of a fake “historical museum” based on my world. This idea was inspired from my visit to the war museum last year.

My plan is to set up a few displays and portraits that will represent my characters as if they were real historical figures in the context of the story-world.

The above is a mock-up of my gallery. The sample display on the very left would be of an item from the story-world or perhaps a diorama of a historical event. The ovals represent portraits of my characters and the text would read from my wiki articles, whcih will hopefully sound factual and historically-sound like the ones I saw at the war museum.

[aliucreativetech]

Transmedia Narratives 5 - Starting the wiki

I’ve created a wiki using the website wikia, that allows anyone to started a wiki about anything they want. I feel that this is the perfect launching platform for me to start writing articles.

In my writing I’ve discovered difficulty in keeping the world consistent. While writing these articles I’ve noticed that I write about characters or settings and events that often don’t connect with each other. What I’m hoping is that these articles will find its way to connect with one another eventually.

The reason for this writing style I’ve had is to expand the world as much as possible and force myself to create new locations and character lifestyles. However since the purpose of a wiki is to connect everything I feel that maybe I need to isolate one part of this world and flesh it out fully, then use it as a basis on which to expand the world.

[aliucreativetech]

Transmedia Narratives 4 - Deciding on a theme

In order to decide on a theme, I have to consider what would connect with people more as well as personal interest in the theme.

I also had to consider various factors of said setting in order to stay consistent and keep continuity:

- The time period in which it is set, whether its a specific date/year or simply an ambiguous time in the past of future.

- Setting location, is it on earth? is it on another planet? is it on a planet at all? Locations and terrain will set the tone of this world, whether it’s a water world or a landscape of various treacherous areas.

- Characters, will they be human or alien? Relatable beings or benevolent/mysterious creatures.

As for right now I feel that I should write based on what I’m most comfortable with in order to get something started. I’ve decided on write on sci-fi as it’s the theme I have the most interest in in terms of experience and interest. With this in mind:

Time period: To start off I feel that I should write some grounding articles in order to get a feel of the world. Because of this I feel that limiting myself to a specific time period may limit my options for the time being, with that being said the time period for now will be set in an ambiguous far future. The far future also allows me to be more creative in terms of the world, assuming its set on earth, as I don’t have to adhere to any established modern history as any amount of things could have happened from now till then.

Setting: This being my most ambitious writing project I feel that I should settle on earth. The reason behind this is the fact that a wiki will require a lot of consistency and continuity as all details are explored, not just what I want to show such as in a novel or short story. By using earth I can use elements familiar to people while at the same time create new histories due to the future time-period in which it is set.

Characters: I already have a few characters in mind to populate this world with but there are a lot of missing slots in terms of relationships that these characters have with each other and others. As with the time period I feel that I should start writing about these characters and the environments that they live in and see where my writing takes me.

[aliucreativetech]

Transmedia Narratives 3 - Story-Worlds continued

Another theme I’ve decided on is the polar opposite of science fiction which is fantasy involving magic, mythological creatures and old-timey settings.

Fantasy has a lot of potential for settings because of its well established popularity in mainstream media. Some perfect examples is the Harry Potter series and the more recent Game of Thrones. Harry Potter has an interesting setting in that, although it is set in a more modern age, it still managed to create an entire world based in fantasy, thus it has proven that fantasy can be mixed with other genres and time periods well.

Image of Harry Potter’s fantasy side, the academy of Hogwarts.

As for audiences, fantasy can contain mature content but at the same time it can easily be child-friendly as the setting is a lot less tech-heavy and instead relies more on characters and no-need-to-explain magic. This allows it to be more family friendly in terms of narrative and themes.

[aliucreativetech]

Transmedia Narratives 2 - Story-World

The story-world that I plan to create should be something relatable and easily contributable to. With that in mind I’ve brainstormed a few themes that I could go with. Each have their positives and negatives but since everyone has different tastes in terms of themes it will be difficult to decide on one specific theme or style/tone.

The themes that I chose were based on personal interest as I think that the effort I put into something I’m passionate about will come through in my writing and in turn create something more engaging than if I tried to make something I thought people might like.

The first theme I thought of was that of a sci-fi nature. I have always had an interest in sci-fi since I was a child. The concept of futuristic worlds fascinates me and was influenced by media through films and novels such as Alien, Minority Report, etc. I would always borrow books about future technologies from my primary school as a kid. These factors have affected me even until now.

The first sci-fi setting is that of a dystopian-style setting, more specifically the sci-fi sub genre of cyberpunk, which is the integration of digital space, hacking, human augmentation, corporate-owned cities, all under a very oppressive tone and atmosphere.

This setting is generally considered mature due to the content, themes (such as corruption, corporate oppression, etc) and other high concept ideas that would be unsuitable for children.

A typical example of a dystopian city, dirty, dark and lit-up by corporate advertisements.

The second sci-fi setting is utopian. This setting has a lot less going on for me as utopian is typically seen as having less conflict and thus a lot less interesting story-wise. Concept-wise it could have lots of interesting and high concept ideas but this just doesn’t interest me as purely a setting. However, a utopian society within a dystopian world would be an interesting combination that I can explore.

A typical sample of a utopian city. Clean, peaceful, perfect.

[aliucreativetech]

Transmedia Narratives 1 - Wiki Concept

For my Transmedia Narratives project I’ve decided to create a story-world from a wiki. My plan is to create something that relies more on content to drive its concept. The reason for this is that I enjoy creating stories and I believe the telling of stories can connect with anybody.

My project was inspired by the film and novel wikis that I would usually peruse in my own time. Not only were the wikis of these stories informative of that story-world, they were also extremely fascinating and interesting to read. I found myself spending countless hours on these wikis and one day realized that I’ve spent more time on the wiki than the original source-material that the wikis were based off.

The reason I feel that this concept has a lot of potential is from the fact that even while I would read wikis based on the books or films worlds I’ve never read or seen I could still feel immersed in the story-world that the author had created, this sparked the idea of creating an entire story-world from just a wiki, my thought process was that, if the wikis that immersed me stood alone without the backing of the original source material, would it have changed the immersiveness and richness of the wiki content? My answer would be no.

Example from the Hunger Games wiki. Doesn’t reading about these characters make you want to know more and explore the wiki?

[aliucreativetech]

Emergent Practices - Presentation

The presentation was something of a mixed bag due to the nature of how our group worked on separate projects. As for my project I received a lot of user feedback based on our concept that I should have sought after earlier. Something important that I’ve learned is the importance of user feedback. What I have in my head may not translate to people the way I expect. User feedback is something I should have done earlier in my project.

A way to have gone about this without developing an app would have been to survey user interest in the idea, as well as finding out awareness surrounding idle games and how it appeals to people. From the other presentations it was clear that the better ones went through a lot more of an iterative process involving user feedback. For most of my projects throughout BCT, user feedback was never a high priority so I feel I’ve never really considered it as much as I should have.

It was good to hear that a lot of people had some interest in my concept and that my thoughts of what might interest people wasn’t completely off the mark. However, I could have had a much more refined concept and with more user wanted features if I had surveyed. This is something I will definitely be keeping in mind in all my future projects out in the real world.

Not bad, though!