FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions about the creation of our Instagram novella.
Instagram is known as a showcase for beautiful things- food, fashion, travel, innovation. Why did you choose to tell a story about such a dark subject using this platform?
We were attracted to what Instagram represents in today’s world and how much of a storytelling framework it is in itself. It’s a key component of the social media landscape that allows any person, business, or institution to mold their own public narrative—show off the highlights, leave out the less palatable.
The world we dreamed up was dystopian, but not that far from the reality we’re living in today. We thought the juxtaposition of conveying this bizarre reality through a medium so many of us use today, spend our time on, and communicate through could release a stark message of how eerily abnormal it is to normalize reporting, adapting, and adjusting to gun violence.
We also wanted to tell this story visually. The policies or solutions being suggested, such as arming teachers or installing bulletproof bunkers in classrooms, are stranger than fiction. However, it’s one thing to read it or hear someone frothily talk about it on cable news, but another to see it.
Why did you choose to tell this story in the voice of a fictional school’s summertime Instagram feed?
Many schools today have Instagram accounts which they use as marketing or PR tools to showcase their successes. One of the goals we had at the outset was that the tone of this story had to be dystopian. To do this, we decided to tell the story from a very practiced and propagated voice that’s removed from emotion but based in consequence. The voice of a school’s Instagram account — which we imagine would be written by the administration — ticked all these boxes and was also an essential storytelling tool. We wanted our readers to question each post and not take anything coming from this feed at face value. The surface-level narrative tells one story, but underneath there is a really fallible institution struggling with how to transition from a tragic event on its campus — a school shooting — and its struggle to reassure both faculty, children, and parents that life can go on.
The summertime narrative of Instagram posts by William H.G. Butler Middle School was a frame within which we could capture this transition. Even though school is not in session during the summer, administrators use this time to transition and plan for the school year ahead. We used a real-time framework to chronicle that this school is becoming a very different place than it once was. Thus, we started this story at the close of one school year (setting up the post-shooting world we’re about to enter) and ended with orientation. In between, we chronicled all the measures taken to implement the new normal.
What were the challenges of using the platform? How did you take advantage of it?
One of the biggest challenges we had was how to get into the mindset of being promotional about really dark and difficult topics. It took us a while to strike and refine the tone each week, but we also understood Instagram is a visual medium with a built in grid, so we could use this to structure weekly themes. These themes created an episodic framework which allowed us to filter the narrative through a more nuanced lens. We took this opportunity to construct our ideas using layouts of the types of media that schools use to communicate with their community, such as yearbooks, flyers, or even, newspaper ads. Each of these formats come with their own rules and restrictions so to speak, but have a visual narrative built in that people already know how to decipher. This allowed the abnormal content to stand out within a very recognizable composition.
Why did you decide not to show the faces of the victims or the shooter?
This project was actually conceived from the idea of how to visually depict unjustifiable loss. We immediately thought about the yearbook as a standard space all kids take part in, and what this would look like in a post-shooting climate. What does it look like when one student has been killed and the classmate right next to them survives? When put into the filter of a yearbook, the empty spaces that sit next to the image of a happy child are a visual representation of this loss and a solemn reminder of an innocent life gone too soon.
We chose to exclude the identity of the shooter from the narrative not only to assist the school’s propagated voice, but also because–and maybe more importantly–we wanted to deliberately avoid playing into the race and gender stereotypes of mass school shooters.
Who is the audience?
While a lot of the specifics in these posts speak to students and educators, this narrative is definitely for the wider general audience. We wanted to bring light to the policies being put in place, industries being created, businesses profiting, and lives being put on the frontline in the name of guns.
