freyasun Uncategorized

Design, Creativity, and the Life of a Project

I never think of myself as an art person. I learned how to use video editing tools in high school but I never really learned how to create videos. I learned how to code a website but I knew coding was not all about web design. One day I became unsatisfied with myself because I realized that anyone with my skills could create the things I created and what I had learned were not what could make a project unique. Then I started to think about it.

  • What is Design?

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  • What is Creativity?

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  • What brings Life to a project?

        … ?

These were the questions that first jumped out of my mind. With these questions, I started my attempts in this multimedia storytelling class. Actually, these terms are familiar to me as a senior communication major. I have learned and practices multimedia skills in digital communication class and I have ‘designed’ my personal social media content and online portfolio before but I feel I never touched the core of these terms.

One of the most valuable things I gained from this class is that how to design a lively creative project cannot be taught by others but can only learn by myself.

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I truly think that just like one can never teach his or her uniqueness to others, creativity cannot be taught. However, it is not that I think all the books and examples we read and learned in class were not useful. In contrast, I think they were great inspirations for my projects. I especially like Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon and Design is Storytelling by Ellen Lupton. The former book introduces the author’ personal ways to acquire creativity. The latter book is not only easy to read but applied the design concepts mentioned in the design of the book itself. Also, the Snow Fall by John Branch exemplifies the power of multimedia storytelling.

Back to my previous point, how to design a lively creative project can only learn by oneself. This is a good example as one of the learn-by-doing things. When reflecting on the whole semester, I feel that this multimedia storytelling class has provided me a good setting for the “doing” part.

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I still can’t articulate definite answers to the questions I have even today but at least I see a road leading to them. I feel confident that by getting my hands dirty on my future projects, I will eventually come to the answers.

freyasun Uncategorized

Connecting the Dots: Thoughts on Multimedia Elements in My Story

Revision leads to improvement, not perfection.

For me, the post-production phrase is where the producer should shift from creating new contents to filling in the gaps in the existing work. This shift started from improving the base of my multimedia story, the long-form narrative. My initial goal for this story was simple: I wanted to leave something as a record of my experience as a Chinese student at Furman and I think it would be more meaningful to capture other Chinese students’ lives as well because they were also part of my life and I am sure there would be many colorful moments they could share with me.

My initial assumption was there must exist a balance between the cheerful moments and the challenging moments I could learn from other students. However, after I organized the interviews to the first draft, I realized that I actually collected many complaints rather than happy memories. This problem led to a unbalanced tone in my story as well, especially when I chose to synthesize the experiences and write the story using a single protagonist. To solve this unbalancedness, I followed Dr. Kwami’s suggestion to add more characters in the story and to delete the redundant paragraphs that may lead to a heavy negative impression in reader mind.

When I finished my second draft, I still felt unsatisfied with the story: The more I stared at the draft, the more unsatisfied I felt with it. I became unsure about the style, the structure, the characters and then I wanted to start over the whole thing. I knew I was getting myself in to a dead end, so I decided to stop for a while and give myself a relief from the narrative.

When I shifted my attention away from the draft, I saw the needs for connecting everything together.

When I started to pay attention to the multimedia elements, I realized that there are many things to consider besides the narrative draft. My planned multimedia elements are a calendar, a map of events, and a video about the Chinese New Year dinner. I already shot the photos and the clips I needed so then I edited them for a rough cut. The major problem I encountered was the unmatched video quality and the lighting issues. This was mainly because I used different devices, sometimes the camera and sometimes my cell phone, during the production phrase. For the first problem, I remedied it by making the overall size of the video smaller and for the second problem, I had to learn light correction to fix it. 

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Editing the Video

After I finished the rough cut, I started to make the map of events. Since most of the main events in my story were set to happen at Furman, I downloaded the Furman parking map and tried to add descriptions on it. When I finish the draft, I felt this map was kind of repetitive and I have not decided whether to include in my final project. The same thing happened with the calendar: the information illustrated was repetitive and it added little to my story. This is the part I should spend more efforts on in the future.

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The Furman Parking Map

My Post

The Schedule Example

The layout and the display of the final product are very important for catching the readers’ eyes.

Reflecting on the reading from last few weeks, I know the final display of the story is crucial. For the layout and display, there are multiple aspects to consider as well such as the inclusion of information, the completeness of the functionality, and the design for aesthetics. Luckily, there are tools that are specifically designed for these needs. I am currently arranging my project on Adobe Spark because it seems to work well in incorporating multimedia elements and in making the whole project consistent in style but I may also try other platform later to compare the final result. In addition to the platform, I made a color template for this project to keep the consistency. I used two Furman colors, purple and gray, and three colors from the classic Chinese painting pigments:

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The Color Template

For the personal project, I don’t actually have many data in numbers but I am considering making a relation graph among the characters and maybe more characters than the ones mentioned in the story and give them all a short biography. In this way, I can make the story more inclusive and probably more representative. As I mentioned before, there are tools that can help me with all these things.

freyasun Yiwei Sun

Producing a Narrative like Making A Stuffed Bunny

Moving from the pre-production phase to the actually production, I asked myself what is the most important thing in my media project. It took me no time to give an answer: The Story. A boring story won’t attract any reader even with great rhetorics, just like a stuffed bunny with pretty appearance doesn’t compensate its lack of content.IMG_7067

Since I have already planned for the multimedia contents I am going to gather during the production, the next step was to follow the blueprint. The first thing I did for the production phrase was to schedule and to conduct my interviews with my participants. The topic I am focusing on was the Chinese students’ experience at Furman University. Therefore, I designed the environment for the interviews to encourage Chinese students to speak out their real feelings and memorable experiences in college.

Choosing the Material

I started with my most familiar friends, which are my roommates, Miss M and Miss T. It was a Saturday night; we were sitting together in the living room and watching a television show together. The conversation flowed to our daily trivial in that week. Miss M then complained about the difficulties she met when applying for the drivers’ license.

“You went out early in the morning but got nothing done when you came back.”

I could recall her tone even for now; it was great for making people sympathetic. I realized that it was an opportunity for them to open up so I started to ask more questions about their thoughts. I was inspired by this conversation to use the second person narrative for my storytelling.

I finally found a suitable material to sew the cover for the bunny.

Gathering the Content

Soon after the first conversation, I participated in three major events involving many Chinese students. The first and the third ones were the recent CLPs on Chinese performance and the international dancing show. These activities gave me insights into the acculturation levels and the efforts to promote Chinese culture among Chinese students. The other event was the Lunar New Year Banquet at Koi Chinese Cuisine. There were around twenties Chinese students presented at that night including from the first-year freshmen to the fifth-year seniors at Furman. As many pope might have known, the dining culture in China is closely associated with group conversations, especially during the festival banquets. The topic ranged from new year wishes to the sharing of fun moments. This brought many positive aspects of international education experience. In addition to my own experiences, I interviewed seven other Chinese students about their individual stories at Furman. Most of the interviews were conducted in Chinese so it took me a few days to translate and to transcript these interviews.

Now the a bag of Poly-fil is ready to be stuffed into the toy bunny.

Piecing the Parts Together

Structure is a crucial part of a story. The book Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon introduced three ways to structure the story as following.    

Image in Show Your Work!

Since my stories were gathered from different people and with different contexts, the structure is extremely important for attracting the readers’ attentions and for guiding them through the story. When I finished my first draft, I did not realized that my narrative curve was like the one of Metamorphosis with a upwards tail in the end. There were too much negative aspects in the narrative and the tone became monotonous after a while. I am currently working on editing the plots to make the story more interesting. After all, I believe the key to success is to keep improving.

After this step, the bunny should have its complete shape…

Adding Some Decoration

The other important aspect of this project is the multimedia elements. The biggest challenge I have in the current stage of production is how to incorporate sound, images, videos, and infographics into the written narrative of the story. For the next phase, I will spend most of my time solving this problem.

freyasun Yiwei Sun

Design as Positioning the Present

For 12091km, 23 hours, a plane slithered over the vast Pacific Ocean and took me from China to the United States. Its destination was clearly marked on the map, but what about mine?

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Image from: Google Maps

The Journey

It was definitely not the first time I took an overseas plane like this — after all, I am now a senior at Furman University, an American college — but the experience wasdifferent from my previous trips.

When I spent my four-hour layover at Narita International Airport, I was in the stressful last hours before my graduate school application. I was waiting for the next flight in the lounge and typing random things into my personal statement draft and a surge of lost suddenly came. The surge was condensed into one sad realization of my life: the future was in the fog and so did the past.

Someone said that showing oneself to others is the journey of self-discovery. I agreed with this statement and as I found out, it was also a journey of struggle. I never had that strong feeling of lost again like I did that day in the airport but actually, the thought still lingered in my deep mind even as my applications had finished.

This was why I finally decided to do something with this thought when I pondered for a personal project topic.

A College Student’s Lost in Past and Future? That doesn’t sound like an easy topic for a multimedia project. A good project topic should be both interesting and practical.

During the brainstorming for the project, I listed the unique experiences I have had in the past that might distinguish me from other college students and then the answer was clear. Most of the experiences were linked to my cultural background and my identity as an international student. Hence, I decided my topic as Chinese Students’ Experience at Furman University.

The Turing Machine

Once the topic had been decided, the following planning became a pipeline business. For the project proposal, I set dates for interviews, organized the materials I had, and considered ways to acquire additional materials. It seemed that I had a complete plan for this project.

“But did I?” I asked myself. I was sure, at that time, that something there was something missing in the project. However, I am not sure what it was. I was not content with my project proposal but neither did I intentionally search for the missing stuff — I didn’t even know where to start.

On the one hand, life is full of surprises. My thoughts on this project got advanced when I was doing my homework for another course, Computational Theory. 

A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation that defines an abstract machine, which manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite the model’s simplicity, given any computer algorithm, a Turing machine capable of simulating that algorithm’s logic can be constructed.

— Turing Machine, Wikipedia

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Image from: The Excel Turing Machine

I know most people might have never heard of a finite automata or a turing machine, so I would simply put it like this: The biggest difference between a Finite Automata (a functionally limited computing model) and a Turing Machine (an omnipotent computing model) is that the latter has a memory storage and thus, a current state.

I finally found the significance of my project for myself. Memory and recording themselves are valuable enough for the present and with the present, one would not be lost in the past and future.

On the other hand, during the process of studying about storytelling, I more and more recognized importance of design and aesthetics. Now people like to say that being visually appealing is not the only standard for good design and there are much more in arrangements and organizations of other aspects in design but I think for me, I still need to learn more about the basics.