Things that went to plan and things that didn’t went to plan

 

  • Schadenfreude- If Tumblr treats me well (if we’ve learned anything from this project it’s: always trust in Tumblr) schadenfreude is a German word for “the feeling of pleasure derived by seeing another’s misfortune. This was always meant to be our motivator for the story, a kind of black comedy element where the audience must eventually look at themselves and think, oh god how did I get here. I think this has stuck. I’ve tried navigating our project as if I’d never seen it before and I feel like I am motivated by some sick desire to see what happens to Emily and discover more about her incredibly sad personality. Whether or not the true audience (I’m looking at you, Dan) will be motivated by the same desire and see the irony still stands to be seen.
  • Sexualisation unexpectedly came up as a major theme but I made a whole other post on that, I think it’s worth a read.
  • The narrative was pretty fleshed out, but considering the universe of Emily, very similar to our own, is unending, we could have fleshed it out a whole lot more. If we had countless hours and dollars to spend, we could have created online presences for other teenagers in Emily’s school, we could have used models in order to give them a more realistic persona through the use of selfies. More would have taken place through video and voice acting. All that kind of stuff. Instead we’ve used lots of reblogging and textual posts. This is ok, for a project of this size, but there was potential to go bigger.
  • It was almost too realistic. I think in the beginning we expected our themes to be so obvious that we didn’t think that we’d need to explain anything. However when testing out the story on people that knew nothing about it, they mostly just said it was super realistic, and because the teen attitude that we’ve portrayed is so common and normal, people didn’t think much of it. This is ironic because the comedy of our project is that this is a caricature of real life, but apparently it’s so realistic that it’s difficult to see it as fiction and therefore understand the themes and concepts behind the story. Because of this we had to add the Statement of Intention page. It’s a definite improvement and hopefully clarifies the decisions that we made without giving away so much information that it tells the story without people needing to follow the actual story.
  • The Instagram page, that we originally thought would be an important element, became almost obsolete.  The transmedia method requires that different elements of the story be significant to the story, but the Instagram elements aren’t. They build character but only slightly and in a way that is very similar to the regblogging on the Tumblr anyway. We were originally intending to post information on the Instagram so that not all events unravelled on the Tumblr, however we found it difficult to do with only images. If we had more time I think we could have used it much better, but it did become irrelevant. Instead we created a Facebook page that fleshes out the story in place of the Instagram. It adds a whole other element of discussion about the themes after the event of Emily’s death and allows us to employ more remix theory by linking to similar stories or studies about our themes, that reinforce the significance of the issues that our story explores.