Emoji’s are a semiotic tool that I use in my daily communication as I text friends and family. The number of emojis available on my iPhone has grown in recent years so, I began this task believing it would be pretty simple to summarize the plot of a movie using them. I chose a film that I have watched countless times as I knew the storyline well and had just watched it again over the long weekend as a family.
Emoji Keyboard: Apple iPad
I started with the title as they are both nouns and there were several options available to represent them. I then began to build the story based on the main plot components. I had selected this movie based on how easy I thought it would be to visualize but although the plot has very recognizable scenes, I quickly found there were many components that were hard to represent even with the hundreds of emojis available on my iPhone. I decided to simplify how many details that I was going to show and focused on a few key events.
Emojis are useful as part of multimodal communication but the Emoji Dick book created by Fred Benenson, illustrates the difficulty of using them as the sole source to tell a story. Using Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, he transformed the original 10,000 sentences of Moby Dick into a 726 page pictorial novel (Gitelam, 2018). You can represent many nouns and verbs with emojis but it is much more difficult to use them as adverbs, pronouns or to express negation (Gitelam, 2018). As well, how many of these pictures are interpreted can vary from culture to culture or generation to generation. We have seen emojis, such as the eggplant, develop connotations that users may not understand.
Stephanie Carr
October 18, 2021 — 6:24 pm
My guess is that this movie is The Princess Bride.
I like how you created spaces between each idea or part of the movie to symbolize what had happened. This allowed the movie to be broken down in visual chunks.
I had not heard of Emoji Dick and decided to see what it was all about. It is so cool that they made Moby Dick into an emoji story. That would be fascinating to read through. I would like to actually challenge myself to do so. After further research, I discovered that there is another book that has been done in all emojis. The other one is Book from the Ground by Xu Bing. It would be interesting to do a discussion after reading an emoji book to see what the different outcomes would be from different perspectives.
DeeDee Perrott
October 19, 2021 — 3:01 pm
The image Ernesto included on the assignment page for this task came from the Emoji Dick novel and it got me curious about the project. The Book from the Ground is a different style as it uses brackets and other punctuation features that I think clarify the story. And yes, you are correct about the movie 🙂
Marlis
October 21, 2021 — 2:16 pm
My favourite movie!! I think it makes it much easier to follow and decipher if you are familiar with the context and the story. I have looked at other assignments and I find it very difficult to understand the message unless I’m familiar with the story. The same emojis can convey a variety of messages depending upon the reader’s previous experience/knowledge and cultural context as well. I am also of an older generation that didn’t grow up with emojis, so it is more foreign to me in that way as well.
Nicely done summary 🙂