When I first thought about creating the story using emojis, I thought that the movie I chose would be easy to visualize. I assumed that there were emojis for the characters that I was thinking about, but no, there were no emojis. It was a complete challenge to try to tell the story using the emojis that were available on my phone. I accepted the challenge and decided to continue with my choice, as it was a movie I have recently watched.
In order to tell the story I relied mostly on the main ideas about the movie. I decided to start with the title, even though with the emojis, it is difficult to guess. Starting with the title and continuing with the main ideas of the plot, made sense to me in telling the story. I tried to create a sequence of events and organized the ideas by lines. Kress (2005) argues about the importance of sequence, and how it gives the author the power of unveiling information, making readers dependent. Whereas in an image, since all information is presented at once, the reader can decide on the sequence to create meaning. In this emoji story, since we are trying to uncover the message, the title of the book, and plot, and all emojis are presented at once, the reader would have the opportunity to create the sequence that makes most sense to uncover the story.
Pictorial writing with emojis was a complete challenge, and as Bolter (2001) says, picture writing seems to be primary, almost like a silent language. Whereas alphabetic writing would be secondary writing to spoken language. It truly felt as if more was needed in order to properly convey the plot of the story. Also, when choosing the emojis, one of the biggest challenges, other than the limitations in choice, was to choose emojis that could be interpreted the way I intend them to be. Bolter (2001) explains that picture writing is constructed culturally. As I chose the different emojis, I wondered whether the readers of my story would understand my choice of emojis, for example “going on different adventures” by the choice of rock climbing, biking, etc.
I still wondered if this emoji depiction of the story is successful. Would the viewers/readers guess the movie?
References:
Bolter, J. D. (2001). The breakout of the visual. In Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Kress, G. (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and Learning. Computers and Composition 22(1), 5-22.
