Tanya Rusheon

Here is a quick look at a short scene I will be working on this month. 

For Multimedia Adaptation, we were required to write an adaptation of the short story “Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry. In that story, a woman is determined to give her husband a wonderful gift in spite of not having the money to purchase such a gift. She sells her prized possession, her hair, to buy him a watch chain to match his prized watch, only to find that he, in turn, has sold his prized watch to buy her a set of beautiful hair combs. 

My adaptation of this classic is a little different. It focuses on the plight of a group of adventurers in a medieval fantasy setting that have failed their most recent quest and have no money to resupply. This is a problem in particular for the archer, who is out of arrows, and for the wizard, who is out of spell components. The archer decides to sell his prize bow to get the wizard his spell components while the wizard sells his spell book to get the archer a quiver full of arrows. 

The problem with updating the original story to make it relevant for a modern audience is kind of a societal one. We live in a consumer society where goods are readily available and many people have credit cards and financing options, so even if cash is a little tight, things can still be purchased or even put on layaway. It makes little sense nowadays for someone to go to such drastic measures as selling their hair in order to purchase something. That is why I decided to make the setting a medieval fantasy where the economy has flexible reality and I didn’t have to work quite so hard to come up with a plausible scenario for my story. 

References

For this week’s assignment, we need three examples of media convergence and gamification.

My three examples are:

1. Habitica

https://habitica.com/

Habitica is a habit tracking platform that turns your everyday tasks and goals into quests that earn you experience points to level up an 8-bit avatar and gold to outfit them with epic loot. For daily tasks or habits, not completing them will result in your avatar losing hit points. 

2. Zombies, Run!

https://zombiesrungame.com/

Zombies, Run! is an exercise game. You have to run from zombies. You can track your run with either GPS functionality or a gyroscope in your phone. It plays music through your speaker or headphones until the zombies show up and then you have to run faster. While you’re running, you automatically pick up supplies to upgrade your home base, and there’s a storyline that plays out over the speaker as well. 

3. SuperBetter

https://www.superbetter.com/

In order for branding to be effective, it must display what your product is about and what consumers can reasonably expect from you.

Three websites that utilize effective branding are: 

https://simonscat.com/

https://www.grumpycats.com/

http://www.petethecatbooks.com/

Simon’s Cat is a cartoon cat that engages in hijinx. The site is colorful and includes several illustrations of Simon’s Cat engaging in different activities. The links to the different products are easy to find and navigate. 

Grumpy Cat’s website is a wealth of images of Tardar Sauce, the world famous Grumpy Cat. The colors of the site are reminiscent of Tardar Sauce’s coloring. Their webstore is easy to find and there isn’t a single picture of Tardar Sauce smiling, so she’s definitely being faithful to her image. 

This month, I wrote the pilot episode of a web video series entitled Double, Double, Tea, and Trouble. It was actually a lot of fun and very informative. A web video series is a lot like a television series in that it tells a complete story in a series of episodes, but it does have its differences. For one thing, a web series is better served by being shorter and you’ll often find them in the 6 to 10 minute range. One of the things that I learned is that you have to be relatively budget friendly when writing a web series. It is easy to imagine that a film or a television show might get lucky and have an extraordinary budget for costumes and locations, but a web video series is pretty much a Do-It-Yourself proposition. If the story isn’t strong enough to be shot on a smart phone in your backyard, it’s probably a story that needs to be told in another format.

That being said, my web video series completely takes place in the middle ages with ALL the costumes and a cottage being burned down in the very first scene. As such, this is very much one of those, “Do as I say, not as I do” moments of reflection.

Another way that a web series is different from other styles of writing is that there is an opportunity for bonus content. If your audience is watching from a computer, it is reasonable to expect them to engage with the show with the comments section or by jumping on the twitter or Tumblr feed. You can also post links to other supplementary materials, such as websites or blogs. In short, web series lend themselves to a great many possibilities for trans media storytelling and it would be a shame to let those opportunities pass by.

If I was going to do this for a living, I would really need to focus on not being so indulgent with my material. I wrote a period piece this month just because I thought it would be fun to do, not necessarily because I thought it would be good for this format. As I said before, production costs really come into play when producing a web series. Unless you’re going for laughs with a B-rated feel, special effects heavy storylines can be hard to manage on a  small budget. Also, keeping the characters to a more manageable number is something that I would have to work on. Most of the actors that I know run on food and even if they were willing to work for nothing, you would still be expected to feed them. The more characters you have in a scene, the higher your grocery bill is going to be. I’m not against becoming more involved with making a web series or two, but there are definitely things about my writing style that I would have to change to make it more feasible.

References

These are three images to remind me of things that I could be doing with my writing while going to school: writing reviews, writing my book, or helping out with my writer’s group. 

References