Zach's Narrative Principles Journal

Monday 18th February 2019 (1-2pm) Today's lecture was, personally, not very useful. It started by causing a panic attack in regards to where we currently are in the module, as it's been changed. I panicked solely on the fact that I am working in a group, and the brief has been changed to us working solo.  After that our lecturer (who, in all fairness, had been ill the the previous week) tried to give us the creativity lecture again, before settling on a worldbuilding lecture, instead. Overall, not a very helpful session; look forward to next week's which will hopefully come in more useful. Tuesday 19th February 2019 (1-2pm) Today was simply a regrouping session between myself and Steffi. We collaborated, figured out where we were, and figured out what we needed to do in preparation for our presentation. 

Monday 11th February 2019 (1-2pm) Unfortunately our lecture today was cancelled due to illness, so instead I decided to go to the University's library and do more research on tropes of spy movies and video games. Below is what I compiled from various sources on the internet. Click here to access the powerpoint Tuesday 12th February 2019 (1-3pm) Today's lesson was very productive in my personal opinion. I took the time to sit and start drawing out storyboards onto Photoshop, using my previous iteration as a base and going off of that. My tutor, Helena, advised me to maybe include more panels so I am atempting to do that by breaking the long scene down into lots of different shots, while noting beneath each panel what, exactly, I am aiming to pull off on screen. As you can see from the spider-scrawl that is my handwriting, there is vastly more detail in the newer versions. of my storyboards. I also took the time to sit and follow the Plot Overview template giv...

Monday 4th February 2019 (1-2pm) The lecture we had today was taken by Kaye and was focused around the creation of a Mission Statement.  At first I felt a little apprehensive when given the task, as I've done previous work on creating movies and knew how to do it. But I was proven wrong, as she passed out sheets with boxes to fill in that were: Story / Game / Film Title Main Theme / Genre / Running Time Target Audience Story Outline Cast of Characters Why does the protagonist want to do this at all? We then, as a collective in the lecture theatre, chose between four options given to us, between a book, a TV show, a Film, or a game. Of course, as we are adults and thus more mature than the average student, we opted for the children's animated movie, which was How To Train Your Dragon. I hadn't actually seen the movie, so had to rely on Steffi to let me know what it was about, and through this I feel I could give a fairly unbiased opinion on what goes o...

Monday 28th January 2019 (2-3pm) Today's lecture was all about where creativity comes from and how to haness it within our pojects. I learned that the creative process can be broken down into 5 steps which are: First Insght, where we recognise that we have to make something Preparation, where we try to produce the environment and get things set up Incubation, where we let the ideas stew in our brains to find our muse for them Illumination, where we get the 'eureka moment' and start to form proper ideas Verification, where we get feedback from peers and colleagues before the creation begins. I am someone who finds creating, particularly in the case of writing / storytelling extremely difficult. My best work is done when I force myself to be creative, and I found some of today's content to be extremely useful in aiding my personal creative process. I put into use the idea of not forcing ideas to come and thus losing interest and burning out midway through, an...

Monday 21st January 2019 (2pm-3pm) Today, our narrative principles lecture was extremely basic, but nonetheless useful in regards to the grand scheme of this module. We will recieve a series of 12 lectures which are going to be delivered by Ian Sturrock and Kaye Elling, with the conttent being as follows: Week 1 - Intro Week 2 - Story Outlines Week 3 - Rough Storyboards Week 4 - Presentation Preparation Week 5 - Script Formatting Week 6 - Presentation Week 7 - Introduction to Treatments Week 8 onwards - Group Work Within the lectures and our practical sessions we will cover the basics of preparing to create a narrative, such as Flow Charts, Scripts, Points of Views, Character Story Arcs, Character Creation, and more. I found this lecture extremely helpful, and am looking forward to the rest of my module, which entails us taking a known fairytale and flipping it's genre to something completely unrelated (this will be assigned at random in tomorrow's pract...