We created the story of “Flustered Frank” in three stages. Firstly after falling short trying to find an appropriate face for Frank we decided to draw him and the other main character associated with the story. I did the sketching unsure of what I would come up with but after drawing only Frank’s head and importing him into photoshop to colour in we knew that was the way to go. To keep consistency throughout the piece we used the same head for all eight of Frank’s images so I drew a different body for each scenario. Laura began to source all the sounds and images for backgrounds and I edited the pictures together. The final eight images I thought looked convincing as a series although some of the editing was a little rough with the black outlining being a bit uneven. Laura put the video together adding in the sounds and voicing the narration. The narration added more life to the piece and helped make the video seem more cynical and Frank more flustered.
We explored different options for the blog. First we set up a tumblr site but it was awkward to navigate and not that simple to use. So I created the blog through WordPress. I created a static front page with only the video so that users would first see that when entering the site. I created another page for users to submit their own stories and another for the published ones. We added a submission form to make it clear on the submission page rather than having users post in the comments. To keep the “Flustered Frank” theme going I used his iconic face as the logo, other characters as instructional pictures and I tried to use the language style that we had developed in the video.
The main problem with the blog is that new posts are not posting to the “Flustered Stories” page so you have to manually add each one. Other than that I think it ran rather smoothly.
For video works in tandem with our blog rather than a blog being a platform for our video. The whole idea our digital story was not only to tell the tale of “Flustered Frank” but to encourage viewers to submit their own stories. So along with the blog which is where we can gather followers we created a “Flustered Frank” twitter account and #flusteredfrank to try and generate a stir on twitter. To help further promote this we can alsoemploy Facebook but in the meantime we are relying on WordPress and Twitter.
alexnetmed 