Yiwei Sun – Advanced Multimedia Storytelling

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.

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.

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?

Screen Shot 2019-02-12 at 12.32.51 PM

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

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.

Category: Yiwei Sun

Producing a Narrative like Making A Stuffed Bunny