My final thoughts on the program with a advice to incoming students.

I AM A WRITER!

My final video reflection for Advanced Visual Storytelling at Full Sail University.

Final video edit of our short scene project in Advanced Visual Storytelling at Full Sail University.

My reflection on week 3 of Advanced Visual Storytelling.  What a learning experience this week!

Advanced Visual Storytelling, Week 3 video edit.

Advanced Visual Storytelling: Week 2

Here are some of my thoughts on the big takeaways from this week.  This was a big week as I shifted from writing to production, and that was the source of some great learning opportunities.

Advanced Visual Storytelling: Week 2 Revised Director’s Treatment.

Advanced Visual Storytelling: Week 2 Director’s Treatment

Here is the main takeaway from my work in Week 1 of Advanced Visual Storytelling.  There was some great feedback that helped keep my script in check this week.  Thanks for that, and looking forward to week two.

Here is the first rewrite of my single 1 minute scene.  It looks a little long, but I think the pacing will still make it work.

Adapted Scripts

The story I chose to adapt was the basic story for the class, “The Gift of the Magi.”  Everything up to this point in the training has been how to build worlds and characters from our own imaginations.  Now, we were tasked with taking a pre-established story and using our imaginations to recreate that story’s themes.  This was an easy lesson to accept in principle because I have already developed the opinion that adaptations are not and should not be word-for-word translations between mediums.  Some of the greatest modern adaptations, Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, both focused on a singular character, journey, and main theme to adapt from their original works.  What I learned was putting this into practice was the hard part.  While I agreed that adaptations must alter aspects of the original work, I did notice the instinct to not destroy the original author’s writings.

The original format, in this case being a short story, the narrative description was of paramount importance.  The description of the time period, the setting of the house, the style of clothing and hair, the status of valuables, etc. all served to give the reader a fundamental understanding of the setting.  In this way, the reader then understood the stakes of the choices made when the gift exchange takes place.  For the adaptation, taking the form of a short television special, narrative description gave way almost entirely to visual clues through actions and reactions between characters, as well as subtext in dialogue to give the audience the same amount of investment in the story.  Once I let go of a strict adherence for the written source, as long as I maintained a sort-of reverence for its themes, I found it very entertaining – even liberating – to stretch into a different territory to tell my tale.  Through the feedback in the class, I learned that not everything is how I see it and the level of detail necessary to present my vision to others who don’t share my body of experiences.

My story focused on two spies who happen to be assigned to the same area, possibly the same case, but from two different intelligence agencies.  Their proximity leads to them meeting and falling in love.  We pick up the story when one of them discovers the other is tasked with killing him.  This revelation leads the marked spy to defect to prevent dying so that he can be with his lover without restraint.  The other spy, not wanting to carry out the kill, resigns.  Both spies reveal their actions at Christmas, and they must escape since their actions result in both agencies seeking out their lost operative.

I feel like this class completely meshes with my goals as a writer since a long history of my amateur writing has involved adaptations of existing properties and expansions of those properties.  Specifically, I have recently been inspired by Wicked on Broadway and The Land of Stories book series to brainstorm existing adaptations of fairy tales as told by the likes of Disney and expanding on their character’s backstories.

Inspiration:

Image sourced from: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Land_of_Stories_The_Ultimate_Book_Hu.html?id=SpVKDwAAQBAJ&source=kp_cover

Gamification and Media Convergence

Example 1: Choose Your Own Adventure Books

Image copyright is assumed to be owned by Bantam Books or the cover artist.

Sourced from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure

This is the first thing I thought of when I was reading and listening to this week’s lessons.  I was a huge fan of the Choose Your Own Adventure series growing up, and without realizing it, participated in media convergence well before it was considered a thing.  The popularity of the books even created a new genre that speaks to this convergence: gamebooks.  You are the character of the book and choose how the story unfolds.  I didn’t experience this again in true form until Bioware’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic let me choose the light side or the dark side.

Example 2: The Matrix and the Matrix universe

Image © 1999 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Sourced from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix

This one was huge for me and a great example of gamification.  I was a freshman in high school at the time and I couldn’t walk down the hall leading up to or after its release without someone asking “What is the matrix?”  It was the perfect bait to get people excited to see their film, and it worked.  But it didn’t stop there.  The franchise then went full force into media convergence. The two main live action sequels were the tentpoles of the franchise, but everything from video games (Enter the Matrix) to anime (Animatrix) all built on the story and universe being created.

Example 3: Cosplay

Character image copyright is assumed to be Activision.

Sourced from: https://www.giantbomb.com/johnny-napalm/3005-796/

That is a picture of me the weekend I signed up for the Navy.  I was attending MomoCon in Atlanta that weekend and totally freaked out my recruiters.  I went as Jonney Napalm from the Guitar Hero series whose character I was emulating is pictured on the right.  I was into cosplay and all the attention I would get at the conventions.  Make a good costume and you are a celebrity for a day.  I went as the character Kadaj and my friend as Sephiroth, both from Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, and there was a moment where I was in full character literally surrounded by dozens of camera flashes as we acted out a moment from the film.  I would put this under both media convergence and gamification. Conventions typically pull large crowds and media creators supply them with guest appearances, costume contests, giveaways, prizes, sneak peaks, etc.  It’s the perfect fusion.

Thoughts on Creative Writing Portfolio I

I want to be a writer, but can I be a scriptwriter for a living?  When I started this course of study, I wanted to be a Novelist.  I had never done script work and didn’t see that as a path for me.  I knew I would learn a great deal from this program about character development, tone, setting, audience, voice, etc. so I thought I would dive in, learn everything I could, and finish better prepared to write my novels.  But boy do I love scriptwriting.  We dabbled with script writing in a previous course, but the focus there was more on the mechanics of all the parts and less about the content.  

When I got to this course, I think I was excited to write a script in the same way my seven-year-old is excited to feed lettuce to a giraffe at the zoo, thrilling as you do it before moving on.  But I don’t want to move on.  I mean, I do to continue learning this brand-new industry for me, but I want to write more scripts.  I created a web-series premise for this class (Episodic and Serial Writing), and I think it’s great.  I would love to put more work into it and see where the characters go and how they grow.  I learned a TON not just from the process of doing it but from the feedback as well. I have never had exposure to the perspectives of people who don’t really know me aside from my tiny avatar picture and brief bio.  That feedback was extremely enlightening.  It presented me with ideas I never considered and, better yet, interpretations of my work that I hadn’t imagined.  This process also opened my eyes to a whole new medium, the webisode.  I knew of its existence, but I had previously dismissed it entirely thinking the format unsuitable for real storytelling.  My how wrong was I.  Crafting a web series specifically also helped teach me how to keep the story and dialogue tight and always purposeful.  

In the end, the short answer is yes I can see myself doing this for a living.  I love dissecting the story and characters, building the world, laying out the arc, figuring out the rules of the world where I will tell the story, and everything else. The good news is, I will be moving soon and will have much better access to events where I can get my name out there, specifically SXSW which I eagerly await next year’s festival to start attending. With any luck, one day I could present there.

Creative Writing Idea #1 picture sourced from:

http://www.oneinthree.com.au/news/2012/8/13/preventing-intimate-partner-violence-a-two-way-street-preven.html

Creative Writing Idea #2 picture sourced from:

https://www.thelordz.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13761

Creative Writing Idea #3 picture sourced from:

http://passionforthepast.blogspot.com/2013/07/faces-of-history-original-photographs.html

Character Creation and Development, Week Two