Guidelines: Website must have 10 pages, must tell story, must involve thoughts about memory
Idea: To tell the story about Anygirl leaving the school restroom with toilet paper stuck to her shoe and the encounters she has with others along the way to class either directly or indirectly. The main idea is to tell the story from the perspectives of all parties involved, including the viewer. The ideal time span for this story is from the moment it happens, with numerous "short-term" recollections through a number of "long-term" recollections. Short term being anything from five minutes to two weeks later, and long term being a month later to 100 years later.
How to appropriately tell story: Through a viewer-guided sense of time. Present multiple options for the viewer to choose and tell the story. Choices/interfaces such as a timeline(picking certain events in or out of order), linear retelling (like flipping pages of a book), through a spatial designation (purely location and individually based where you can select a room/location and the individual within that location)...could there exist a possibility to organize the memories as thought-topic based as well?
I want to explore the idea of how a single event impacts each observer/viewer/passerby and how each individual has a completely different way of retelling/recalling the event. Especially the fact that details just "disappear" and people "forget" or "block out" what really happened down the road. A single event cannot be perfectly retold simply from putting together people's perspectives-there are too many discrepancies, not only immediately when the event happens, but quite quickly, the story starts crumbling and distorting to the point where no one is absolutely sure of all the details. So the telling of both the short-term and long-term story lines is necessary to accurately explore my thoughts on memory and perception.
Questions to address: How does a single event affect all onlookers in a different way?
What are the short term effects (memories)?
What is remembered (not remembered) immediately? 5 min later? 1 hour later? next day? 2 weeks later?
What are the long term effects (memories)?
What is remembered (not remembered) after time passes? 1 month later? 1 year later? 10 years later (decade)? 100 years later?
What information is retold, what is ignored/blocked out?
How does each person choose what he/she remembers?
Does the specific chain of events get altered? How? By how much?
Is this based purely on who the individual is, or are there certain things remembered by the "group"?
Do a number of people jumble and retell the jumbled information similarly (unknowingly?)?
What details about the place, people, thing, event are highlighted/strongly remembered?
Like the color of shirt, flyer on bulletin board, etc...is there anything "notable" about this particular event/retelling?
Some interesting websites that will help me formulate my telling methods that I've found are Storytelling-Nicolosi , E-Ville Dialogues , In Spring it is the Dawn (this is a fascinating blog/series of blogs), and NY Times Magnolia Plantation . These three sites are all sites where interactive storytelling takes place. Also, I have to read this excerpt by Borges called Forking Path
for class next week.
Class is pretty much over. I'm out!
yes, if only the whole world were like that.
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