Bricks and Lions

Bricks and Lions Cowbird Link

This story is my response to the flipped lectures surrounding creativity and the firewall of China. I took most of the inspiration from the John Cleese video and the China TED talk. I wanted to incorporate the John Cleese’s steps to be creative and also communicate the idea of China being in a controlled online landscape that is beginning to break free.

Gamification

Synopsis

Want a game where you can play in teams or singles? A game that can even turn into a drinking game or a glorious battle?
Well here is one for you.
Tweetories is a game that uses both Twitter and QR codes. Once the code is scanned and a category is determined teams must get on their phones and start tweeting away their answers. The categories can be anything from sports to celebrities and plants to brands of beer. There is a category for everyone to dominate and become the Tweetories champion.

Marketing Image

Decision Tree and Game Rules

Digital Story Telling Reviews

Goldilocks

Goldilocks – the iPhone 4 Mobile Series [Episode 1 – “Meet Locks”] from Majek Pictures on Vimeo.

This digital story was filmed entirely on an iphone yet it manages to feel like a cinematic movie. They mix up the angles of the shots to make use of the smaller camera such as attaching it to the motorbike. There is a quick pace and the montage of murders at the beginning immediately intrigues the audience. There are some issues that are associated with using the iphone, for one it struggles with the light change and also focusing on moving objects. Furthermore there is a slight overuse of music in the beginning and it begins to lose its effect. It works well when it shows the protagonist running as the music changes creating and emphasizing the suspense that runs throughout the piece. The narrative itself is strong not only with the montage but the sequence of the protagonist being kidnapped and her captor telling her secretly that he is going to fake her death leaves the audience wanting to know more and tune in for the next episode.

Sound of My Voice

This digital story is the first 12 minutes of the feature movie Sound of My Voice. The excerpt traces a young couple being embraced by some sort of cultish group. The story is well shot with a raw colour scheme that makes the actors seem exposed and vulnerable. The narrative builds the audience interest by introducing the young couple trying to find a house. Once they find it and are in the garage they creepily sit there are wait for someone to get them. At this point it seems as if the girlfriend is in charge and the boyfriend is not fully invested in what they are doing. This dynamic works nicely in creating tension and unease for the audience as you get some sense of fear from the boyfriend. The narrative progresses to where they are inducted into some sort of cult and a young woman tells her experiences of the past two years. It ends with the cliffhanger when she explains her tattoo number “54” on her ankle and announces that she is from the year 2054. This digital story plays a wider role being a promo for the movie as a whole. The weakness of this clip is that it takes 12 minutes to get to the punch line. For a casual viewer most would stick around and quite possibly be put off by the eerie and slow paced start.

Welcome to Pine Point

This digital story is not just a video but a mix of scrapbooking, layering text, playing with diegetic and non diegetic and archive footage. It tells the story of a Canadian mining town that is no longer there anymore. It communicates wider ideas of community and life. The story begins with the narrator and other voices explaining their first interactions with the town with videos of the town. It explains that the town could not be sustained without the mining. Several characters are introduced including Richard the Bully, brothers Lyle and Wayne and Kim the Diva. Each character is explained with their own pages with a mix of video and images to create a character profile. There are two pages for each character. One to describe what they were like at the time of Pine Point and one for where they are today. In doing so the collaboration of multimedia explains the relationship between where they come from and where they end up. The strength of this digital story is that it broadens the sense of what Pine Point is. It does not rely on video but incorporates all different mediums to create a more meaningful picture. There are no real major weaknesses to this digital story although it is a little difficult to navigate as you don’t know exactly when to change to the next page.

QR Story

The stairs were disappearing from below his as feet as he made his way up to the room where his fate would be determined. In his sweaty hand he firmly gripped his papers concentrating hard as to not let them crumple. The first stairwell was easy and he took it two at a time but the third was his downfall.

Literally.

As he turned the corner and sprinted his way up the final few steps he spotted a few of his friends making their way to the classroom. Distracted, the stairs no longer seemed to be in proportion and instead turned into an unseen wall. He fell in the worst way. The way when you know that you are falling and people are watching you so you try and cover it up causing the fall to be even worse. The papers sprayed from his hands and he went bright red in the face. All his friends could do was laugh.