Attraction to Characters and Stories
Overall, this assignment was relatively enjoyable. I had not even seen the assignment before I checked my email from a classmate named Sidney asking if I wanted to be her partner. I happily accepted her offer and we got to texting about what topic we should choose. After deciding to look further into the topic of why we are attracted to characters and stories, my partner and I needed to decide how we would present our research. We discussed a couple ideas but landed on discussing how a well known movie relates to some of the topics discussed in chapter six of the book Media Literacy in Action by Renee Hobbs.
At this point, we began to write an outline to our script, deciding which of us would do the intro and the conclusion, and which of the subjects presented in chapter six we were going to discuss. Emotional truth, tragedy, archetypes, narrative conflict, seven basic plots, and fandom are the topics we chose were most important to prove our knowledge on why people are attracted to characters and stories.
Sidney decided to research Brokeback Mountain while I chose the movie Thor. I chose Thor because of its in-depth story that continues even after the movie ends. It is a classic hero vs villain story that engulfs its viewers into needing to know more about the character development.
It was actually pretty fun to delve deeper into the tactics the producers use to create the story around Thor. Watching movies we do not quite realize that they have used purposeful strategies in order to accomplish their goals of keeping the viewer’s attention.
After we wrote our script, we needed to come up with a way to present our findings. At first I figured that we just would do a google slide presentation and screen record with our voices presenting. However, Sidney came up with the idea to snip together pieces from the movies while we do voice overs of our script. I knew that would be even better than a slide presentation so we both found clips from each of our movies respectively. Then we did our voiceovers and Sidney put all of the clips together to make a montage video and uploaded it to YouTube.
Our video may have exceeded the time constraints by a little bit, but I think we did a really good job of putting together information to show our understanding of why people are attracted to characters and stories. At the start, it took a bit of thinking to come up with how we would show our understanding of the topic, but I feel like analyzing examples from movies does show that we are able to see what goes on behind making a story entertaining and encapsulating.
It was definitely a little bit intimidating to have a partner assignment when we don’t have an in person class to ask someone to work together. However, Sidney reached out and she was a great partner to work with. We were both open minded about the other person’s ideas and we made sure that we gave ourselves enough time to get everything done on time.
Here is the video:
