Story Lab 4
- Brian Zhao
- Feb 28, 2021
- 3 min read
is is the final post for story lab. I have been doing experiments on telling stories in different ways. I created two stories in this project.
The first story which I created in the first two weeks are based on my childhood experience. The name of the story is "Still Wanna Hide?" It tells a story about a boy named Brian was hiding his test paper from his parents, he was then persuaded by his imaginary friend, Michael, and eventually confessed. This story is rather positive and bright. The philosophy I am trying to tell in this story is to be honest and be responsible for our own actions.
And on week 3 and week 4. I created a story named "Happy Camping" which is not happy at all. This story is pretty dark and haunted. And the reason why I created this story is that I want to tell people that it is very important to learn trust and don't let doubt to enhance the conflicts.
Process
In the beginning of week 1, I created the story arc of the the story first.
The story arc is pretty simple. No texts but only visuals.
To make the video more visually compelling, I also added a drawing to express Brian's guiltiness.
And then I came up with the Tedette video.
I did try to make the talk a little serious, but I could've looked happier😂
Link to week1 post: https://brainiac6868.wixsite.com/website/post/tedette-1
On week 2, I started to create comic for this story in a different perspective. Since there really wasn't a side character that can be a narrator of the story, so I came up with the character Michael.
Michael is Brian's imaginary friend. He is also Brian's conscience that eventually corrected him.
I then make the draft of the comic on paper. My peer's feedback about this comic is the characters look too alike. So, for better distinguishing them, I decided to make Michael a white hair boy during coloring the comic in photoshop.
I added the dialogues with figma after coloring.
The finished version of the comic:
Link to week2 post: https://brainiac6868.wixsite.com/website/post/character-shift-comic
On week3, I created an interactive game for the second story, "Happy Camping."I was inspired by Japanese text-based games.
(What I was picturing)
I spent a lot of time on thinking about the plot, I still didn't have ideas about it hours later. But there were some dialogues in my mind. So, I created the dialogue first.
And then I slowly developed this story arc based on the dialogues.
I started to draw the drafts of the characters.
Colored in photoshop.
Finishing the GMC portraits and character settings.
Finishing slides of the interactive game on figma.
Making interactions for each slide.
Link to week three post: https://brainiac6868.wixsite.com/website/post/interactive-game-happy-camping
In week4, I receive peer feedback about the visual elements are too little in the game. And many of the peers lost in the dialogues during playing the game.
(I really can't make too much change to the structure of the game, I only get to fix problems like the left two.)
So I added additional visual elements to try to fix this kind of problems.
Making characters in different expressions.
Putting them into each slide.
And that is what I have been doing in this project.
Here is the link to the refined game:
Learning Summaries:
I have been learning about how to tell stories in this project. I know that I have limited expressing skills in writing, so I chose to use a huge amount of dialogues in the interactive game instead of describing the scenes with texts too much. I hope this can put the players into the scenes. Some insights I learned from this projects are as writers or creators, we don't always have to focus on the story arc in the beginning of the creation, the second thing is that we can always try to put some misleading evidences for the readers in the beginning of the story and surprise them with hidden informations at the end of the story, and the last thing is that we can always try to tell the story from a different perspective.
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