Video Project idea of Steve, Madi & Kat

so for our project we are planning to have a small game similar to the game Talking Tom where there is a main character standing in a room and the user can interact with him by clicking several part of his body or choosing several activities for him to do. 

i will act as the main character and we are planning to film the activities and the movements of the main character separately and when we trigger certain movement the website should display the corresponding video.

we will spend most of our time filming and we should focus on how to make the interaction between the main character and the user interesting rather than merely letting the user do whatever he/she want to the character. (maybe design some conversation like siri?)

Week 7: Response to “The Danger of A Single Story” — Jannie Z

In the TED Talk “The Danger of A Single Story”, Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells her story of growing up as an African child and going the the USA to study. She shared  a lot of experiences of  “single stories”. Like when she assuming her domestic help’s whole family was nothing but poor, and how her American roommate thinks she only listen to tribe music. By presenting those examples, she emphasized the importance of not assuming everything just by one single narrow perspective but multiple angles.

I fully comprehend and acknowledge what she conveys. A person’s knowledge is very limited, and people tend to make assumptions about the things they don’t know very well based on the limited knowledge they have.  The nature of avoiding complexity of human makes us considering people as one thing, one single story. Just like what she says, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”  And the consequence of viewing people from the single story is that “it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar”. At the end of the day, we are just humans, we are similar to each other more than we think we could be.

Video Project Proposal – Clover, Jamie, Nan

Project Philosophy

People tend to believe that the development of things results from multiple factors, including environmental actors, subjective choice from an individual, etc. People may believe that the result of one thing in front of us is generated from all these factors in a reasonable way.

However, when too many factors are mixed up and intertwined with each other, how can we make sure that the result we see is led to by an integrative action from all the factors that we are aware of, rather than – a random result that can be led to regardless of what factors are influencing it?

Things, therefore, may develop in a random fashion, and the result may not be led to, as what people imagine, by the factors that they are aware of. Then, what is the power that is determining this seemingly random result?

Project Idea

An opening scene:

When water drops on one joint of your fist, the direction of where the droplet would go may also have to do with many factors, as you are aware of: the inclination of your fist, the roughness of your pore, or the orientations of your fine hair. However, do they actually making the final destination of the water drop different?

Next scene: CONFIDENTIAL

Project format

An interactive website where there is a storyline that the user can make decisions on their own, and different decisions lead to some result.

Video Project Idea – Taylah, Julia and Justin

 Julia, Justin and myself met on Sunday to discuss our plans for the upcoming video project. We are all really excited to do this task. Our idea is as follows: 

We are going to be adapting a short story by Kelly Link called “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose,” into a screenplay. 

The Short Story is quite eerie and utilizes both first and third person narration to convey the story of a deceased man writing letters to his living wife who he can’t remember her name. 

We are all currently reading the story, its about 20 pages in length and was suggested to us by Julia as it’s one of her favorites. 

We are meeting Thursday to decide specifics on screenplay and cinematography, which parts of the story to select and to solidify our plans. This gives us time to digest the story and to learn more from the class about video production. 

First Scene

Ending Scene

Week 7: The Danger of a Single Story Response – Val Abbene

In this TED talk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks about the importance of viewing people and places from multiple perspectives instead of taking a single story as objective truth. Mass media is often guilty of broadcasting one-sided narratives and reducing groups to stereotypes that deny members of that group individuality. As Adichie explains, this not only harms the global perception of a group, but also the perception that members of that group have of themselves. Without diverse representation in media, children grow up believing that they don’t belong in literature or media because these are spaces dominated by Western representations and ideas. This reminded me of Edward Said’s book, “On Orientalism,” which discusses the problematic practice of the West otherizing and exoticizing Eastern cultures. As Adichie said, there is a “tradition of telling African stories in the West: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness.” This stems from centuries of orientalism that dehumanizes “the other” as negatives that only exist when in comparison to Western culture and ideals. This flattening of human stories is a harmful practice of thinking that reduces individuals to a group identity and doesn’t stop to consider the many exceptions to that narrative. Adichie’s talk is a reminder for everyone that it is necessary and responsible to portray people and events through multiple dimensions because stories are never one size fits all.