Final Reflection

I thoroughly enjoyed this course overall. I learned more about storytelling, which is something I'm passionate about, and had several opportunities to put what I learned to practice.

 

 I learned about what makes a good audio story; overall techniques such as clean audio and overall meaningful sound design including effects, and got to practice audio editing with Premiere Pro. I mainly worked on the sound effects for this project, and a challenge for me was finding/creating sounds that sounded natural enough. If I were to re-do the project I would spend more time making sure the audio felt natural, and I may add more to the story. Pacing is a big part of what does well for a podcast, especially for a narrative fiction story like the one we told. 

 

 We also reviewed what makes a good story in general for this project, outside of podcasts. All narrative stories include characters, a plot, a conflict, and follow a style. Podcasts should capture these elements through purely sound, so that they can be enjoyed without visual elements “on the go”. 

 

 Through our game project I learned the elements of games. I felt that the Hypothesis readings paired well with this lesson. We learned about the different structures games can follow, specifically in “ergodic literature” games, including; the Time Cave structure, the Gauntlet, the Branch and Bottleneck, and more. When becoming introduced to ergodic literature, my classmate Ella Gwen and I played the ergodic literature game, Doki Doki literature club and found that the web of choices expanded more than we had thought. 

 

 The Hypothesis video, “Every game is a language” talked about how games can effectively communicate things to their players, and to do this, a game designer must put themselves in the shoes of their audience. I felt that my game narrative project I worked on with my classmate Sonya, had mechanics that were easy to grasp, and had an immersive narrative that was descriptive enough for the players to feel a weight in the choices they would make. If I could re-do the project, I would try using the program Twine, which I learned about through this course. 

 

 As far as the course essential question; How might we use new media to tell great stories? I believe that the possibilities are expanding as time goes on. A great story starts with an intended audience, and an intended message, which I believe can guide the storyteller to decide which medium they may want to use to tell their story. In this course we learned a lot about stories that are interactive and include visual elements, (aside from podcasts, which are not always interactive and are not visual). I love games, videos, and artwork, but I don’t think that an interactive story always requires visual elements. Oral story telling can be interactive when the audience is included in the direction of the story, and we learned how even written words (books) can be interactive through ergodic literature that requires you to flip pages. 

 

 As I move forward from this course, I would like to continue storytelling, and using these new mediums I learned about to enhance my work.