My Adventures in Digital Storytelling

With no real capacity for fiction writing (or really narrative at all) coming into this project, I had no stellar ideas to begin with. I decided to stick with a story I know pretty well: my autobiography. Riddled with an influenza-induced fever, I began writing a bizarre and exaggerated version of my life. With no clear point to this story/my life, I decided to go ahead and add on a projected fictional ending. I wanted the end result to look as pieced together as possible and to use one shot of my face repeatedly throughout the story. I was prepared for the most lo-fi method of creating the final product– Microsoft Paint. However, I managed to re-acquire Photoshop for a less complex method of creation. Whether the end result was any more clean cut than it would have been in Paint is debatable. Not wanting to draw all of my pictures and finding the Creative Commons photos on Flickr insufficient, I ceded to using Google Image search. Thus, I have a copyright violation-laden video.

While I found the visuals of my digital story to be relatively on target with what I was attempting to do, the audio proved much more difficult. I soon learned it was impossible to narrate in one take. Thus, I had to record small bits of sound, overlap, and line them up. To make matters worse, I was relatively horse while working on this part of the project. And only after I had finished did I notice all of the audible clicking noises from starting and stopping the audio. While I didn’t expect the audio or visual to be particularly aesthetically pleasing, I was at least aiming for a little comedy. I don’t think it really came across in the audio, and I’m disappointed by that.

As far as what parts of networking culture I drew upon, I would have to say the vast visual database of the internet/ the popularity of the Google image search. The story itself didn’t fit into any particular viral genre I’m familiar with. It was really just a digitally-updated autobiography.

Well, here she is: http://vimeo.com/10461896

A Post For My Undying Love of Chatroulette

Here’ an interesting article I came across the other day confirming what we already knew: The Brits are total pervs.

Perhaps The Worst Segment of What Will Be Widely-Considered the Worst Story of All Time

Previous

Mrs. Jones followed Eric into what appeared to be a simple laboratory conjoining the rear of the cabin. It seemed vaguely familiar, as did most of this ridiculous adventure she was experiencing. He flipped a small ecru toggle and she awoke with a jolt in an even more nondescript lab. “Reflect, if you will,” spoke Eric with an air of smug superiority, “on all of the components of the world you just experienced.” It came to her slowly– all of the elements from this sequence were from other media: the velociraptors were straight out of Jurassic Park, she had seen the exact cabin in LOST, the sunglasses and Who music were clearly from CSI: Miami, and the Frankie Says Relax T-Shirt and Ford Fusion were clear product plugs. “You have just tasted Licensing Hell, Mrs. Jones, where those who break copyright laws spend eternity in an endless narrative of borrowed ideas and characters.” She shuddered and questioned, “but why have I been spared and brought here while Brett Boessen is trapped in this woeful J.J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg-laden eternity?”

Dear God, Brett, please save this story (or put it out of its misery)

Interactive Fiction

First, I played Shade, as we were instructed. I was struck by its simplicity and lack of fantastical beings and enjoyed the fact that some of it was loosely based on the “indie” scene. However, the game soon proved to be confusing. The character was unwilling to do much of what I asked him. After finally finding the plane tickets and vacuuming the floor (which began to turn to sand), I ran out of things to do. It was obvious something weird was going on and there was a sense of overwhelming bleakness. I didn’t like that I couldn’t scroll backwards through the text to see what I had already done. Upon reading the game after I played it, the concept became much more interesting. I wish I could have figured it out for myself, but 45 minutes in I was unsure what to do with the game any longer. My final attempt was the command “kill self,” which was met with a response along the lines of “violence is not the answer.” Had I only known the character was already dying…

I then decided to play Earl Grey from the list of IF games provided. (I originally wanted to play “Broken Legs,” but the script wouldn’t run.) The game did seem to be something about tea, as I had suspected, but it was clearly a fantasy rpg. I spent nearly 25 minutes just repeating the command “talk to Eaves,” and watching a conversation play out. It was extremely boring. At a point, however, I began to get the same response every time and tried to move away from Eaves. He stopped me every time. I examined everything in sight and attempted to kill Eaves. Nothing worked and I quickly gave up on this game. There wasn’t really much I liked about it other than the prospect that I was eventually supposed to start collecting tea from villagers.