Thursday, October 21, 2010

Unit 3 Tutorial

Creating a movie/narrative with your story
-To do this you will first want to pick an audience so that you will know what type of situation you want to present and pick what type of tool you are wanting to use.

1. Think of a way to create a story within your story
-Pick an audience!!

2. Play with tools such as XtraNormal, Zimmer Twins and Movie Maker from our class blog to figure out what type of tool you may want to use to tell your story.

3. Pick a tool
-When picking a tool you will want to:
a. pick your audience
b. brainstorm to figure out what story you want to tell or what situation you want to present

4. Start adapting your story into narrative form by creating a map to layout your story
-You may use templates or drawings
-You may want to lay out as much as you can so you will know what you're adapting

5. Small group showing
-Bring a rough draft to your small group and get feedback to help you finish your story/ narrative

6. REVISE, FINISH draft

7. Final Rough Draft is created to bring in front of peers
-Get feedback from your classmates

8. REVISE, REVISE, REVISE!!!!

9. FINAL DRAFT COMPLETE

FINAL NARRATIVE VIDEO

The tool I used does not have an embedding code, so I posted the link below and I will include my username and password so you can view it. The movie is titled "Two Moms: Final Cut"

"Two Moms: Final Cut" on Zimmer Twins

Username:bmcguir1
Password: 3038

Enjoy :)

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Unit 3: Reading Response

When reading this particular reading take note of two things:
Key components for writing in a narrative tool & new ideas to incorporate into your story.
These two concepts will shape your story into a great narrative piece. One thing that stuck with me that you may want to look for is the concept of using a SCRIPT to portray my narrative piece.
A SCRIPT will do two things for you:
Help you organize your story so that you can see what's going on & lay out your new ideas in front of you to better construct your story.

I also took from this reading that it is important to keep the audience interested. This is important because without an interested audience you do not have an effective story. You want to know two things and be able to differentiate between them: what your audience "sees" and what your audience "hears". This leads me to my favorite section in the reading, "What Makes A Good Story". This section gives us several ideas and concepts used to keep the audience interested such as: CONFLICT, FEELINGS, and EMOTIONS.

These concepts allow your audience to connect with your piece rather than just watching it. Feelings and emotions are key to having an effective story and keeping an audience interested. You want your audience to FEEL something when they watch it. You also want them to connect with the EMOTION of the conflict and with their own EMOTIONS. The last component CONFLICT, brings forth issues in the narrative. The conflict is the argument you are making oppose to something else.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

In Class Writing: Playing with Zimmer Twins

My Video

Playing with Narrative Tools: Xtra Normal and Zimmertwins

While looking for narration tools to use for our next project I came across Xtra Normal movie maker and Zimmertwins movie maker. I like these two the best out of all of the narration tools because I feel it adds a bit of personality and action to our stories. Both of these are similar because they are both very simple to use and basically turn your text into a movie while you pick the characters and action. I feel that using these tools that allow you to pick your characters and voices add to the voice of your story. I played with both of these tools over the weekend and the one I liked the most was Xtra Normal.

Xtra Normal allowed me to pick my characters from a series of situations and simply type in the dialogue that I wanted in my story. This tool allows you to write the dialogue, make the expressions and choose the voices of your characters allowing you to portray them how you want to in a movie form of your story. Xtra Normal is simple to use, but can get a little complex when it comes to the expressions and the publishing of the actual movie. I played around with it for several minutes before I could figure anything out. The pros of using this tool is that it makes a pretty complex way to tell your story and being able to point, use expressions and change voices adds to your story and will portray a better understanding to your audience. The cons of using this tool is that it gets a little complex while trying to publish your story.

Zimmertwins is very simple and would probably be the easier way to tell my story if I am picking between the tool. The characters are more cartoon than real life and it is a bit easier to navigate around the site. I would spend less time trying to figure out how to publish and more time perfecting this narration of my story. The cons of using this is that my project is on gay rights and if I were wanting to use two females or two males, I cant. The actions are limited to the ones you can choose such as hug. It is the simpler of the two I am considering, but it does bother me that you have to have female/ male character situations, but I could always make it work.

I think using the narration tools will be more fun than the previous units, but will require us to be more creative and complex with telling our stories. We will get the chance to have actual cartoons, animals, stick people, etc actually tell our story other than a bunch of words and reading.