Betty wants to be a citizen journalist. But how? It only takes a few simple steps…
Trans-Media Storytelling
13 DecYou should source and develop a subject whose story you tell through the production and broadcast of a “trans-media portrait”; a phrase that we’ve investigated over the course of the class. Your decisions throughout this process should build upon and further develop the work we’ve begun in
creative workshop and throughout the lecture series.
The “Trans Media-ness” of your project will be the degree to which you engage the community of context that surround the issues your narrative discusses. The multi media tool kit that we have used so far as well as the challenges different approaches to story-telling (transformative, collaborative etc) present are things you should now bring to bear on the story that you want to tell.
So, what/who’s story are you going to tell? What are the broader issues that your project will be discussing? Who will be most interested in hearing and engaging with this story ? How are you going to facilitate this?
Due to the fact that the internet in the Coventry University Library is soooo slow! I couldn’t upload the video until I came back home… But don’t worry 🙂 I handed in the task before 4 p.m. today… George is my witness 🙂
Here you go!
[Vimeo 17768968]
Need some explanation? Then go on reading…
What have I learned in this module? I learnt basically what trans-media is. To put it in my own words I would say that trans-media is like a synergy from different sources and channels. That means that trans-media storytelling builds up a collective plot, which got different elements from different category groups. Therefore, you build up a trans-media story within a networked community to help you to get different ideas and creative influences for your trans-media story. That means that your involved community must have a relation to your issue you are talking about.
In the following I am going to describe how I realised the idea of trans-media within my own story.
Everybody reads books and have at least a favourite author or a favourite book. So the issue book came up to my mind. Furthermore, I also like to read books and therefore I decided to work on this topic. This means that I had to find a community that deals with books. I know that most of my friends like to read a lot of books. So I decided to involve as many friends as possible to build up a story around their inputs.
Therefore, I wrote a note on my Facebook wall and on my blog with the demand to send me their favourite sentence from their favourite book. Furthermore, I used Twitter to engage more people then just from my community. Some even retweeted the message so a wider community became involved.
After a while I received some answers. So I started to compile all sentences and tried to build up a new story from these sentences. So in the end I had a list from various narratives, which I tried to order in a sequence that made sense.
Furthermore I have chosen a picture to underline my story. You can see an open book, which is held by a man. Everything is normal except the letters – they are “falling out” from the book. What do I want to express with this picture? I wanted to show that the way just letters do not make sense (because of the missing context from the word) a single sentence also does not make sense because the context of the story is missing. Moreover I have chosen this picture because it shows how the letters fall down and form new words and therefore sentences and therefore a story. So I placed the compiled sentences under the pictures to express this idea.
Therefore, I built (or invented) a new context in which the single sentences got a new sense. I put them all together so in the end the sentences could again be seen and understood within a context. One can say that I am the author from the new story now.
To underline my intention of trans-media I used sound furthermore. I picked a song without voices so the listener/reader is not distracted by another story. In addition I added another sound to imitate the sound of the letters that are falling out from the book. For this sound I used a plastic bottle filled with rice. I recorded the sound while I turned the bottle. For me the noise sounds like letters falling out.
So in the end I used multiple media formats: printed texts, digital texts, images and sound.
This is my trans-media story!
Literature Wanted
8 DecWhat’s your FAVOURITE BOOK (English)?
What’s your FAVOURITE SENTENCE in the book?
For a university project I am compiling a list of sentences from different books. Therefore send me “your” sentence and book.
Thank you for helping!
the photographer as an author
24 NovSimon Roberts
Today photographer Simon Roberts spoke to the #phonar class.
Listen to his guest speech here:
Inspired by August Sander he made a study on people in the landscape. Therefore he travelled to Russia and did a lot of research in terms of context of and in a photography. See his photographs in his online book called “Motherland“.
Furthermore, he spoke about his other projects “We English“
and “The Election Project“.
Simon Roberts at work on his caravan. The reason why he takes the pictures from the top of his caravan is that he can overlook the hole scene.
celebrating photographic garbage
19 NovTo say that Joachim Schmid is completely obsessed with photography is a fair and accurate statement. He himself suspects that “few people in the world have looked at more photographs” than he has. At one point he counted: he had looked at 10,000 photographs in one day alone. And he has maintained his manic pace since embarking on his career as a “professional looker” in the 1980s.
Using other people’s (often mundane) photographs, he creates artwork that is alluring, intriguing, and captivating. He revels in photographs that other people lose or throw away in public, especially if they seem to have been discarded with some animosity or intense feeling. He is very much a modern day anthropologist who tries to understand contemporary cultures by studying its visual garbage.
He started one project, Pictures from the Street, (Bilder von der Straße, in German), in the early 1980s and it continues today. For this one, he keeps and classifies each and every photograph — or fragment of a photograph — he finds in a public space. (The collection has more than 900 specimens at present.) If a photograph has been ripped to pieces, he re-assembles what he can and mounts it as a scientist would. All pieces of this collection are arranged and displayed on identical sheets of archival paper, in chronological order, noting the date and place where each was found. It is impossible to look at this collection and not try to imagine stories about who is pictured, and who owned the photo, and why the photos were thrown away.
In one series of parcels, he discovered decades of medium format negatives from a professional photo studio! The trouble was, they were all sliced in half, in an effort to destroy their value. What Schmid discovered, happily, was that he could shuffle the left half of a negative with the right half of another negative to come up with bizarre composites that were uniformly lit and fit together in an uncanny way. It seems the photo studio always positioned its lights exactly the same way for years, and never moved the camera closer or further away from each model!
#phonar – Task VI
18 NovUsing only found images (ie images from family albums and local library archives, not published in magazines) research and construct a photo-artefact that weaves a narrative linking the people depicted within your the images (the archive population).
Development : Build and include a soundscape relevant to your story. Include personal stories from the subjects depicted.
Results are coming soon…
Online Archive
The World’s Largest Online Collection of Found Grocery Lists
1st Version
2nd Version
susanne kober 