Process and challenges
Choosing my story was quite simple because this was a story I had been watching very recently. This was a simple, popular story with what I thought were many ‘visuals’ jammed into the story that I could use for this task. I would have failed even more so if I had tried to translate something longer and more obscure like my favourite book!
I began by writing down my synopsis first on a Word document, which was probably not a great idea because I wrote all the grammatical and syntax bits that I eventually realized couldn’t be easily translated into emojis. After writing my synopsis, I cheated a bit and looked online for some other ideas of emoji stories since I had never attempted to tell one! Unfortunately, all the creativity I saw online didn’t really provide me with inspiration to do more than try my best to painstakingly search for ‘words’ (emojis) to place into my synopsis as I had written down in my alphabetic version. I started with the title because the title worked well to frame the story and was visually the ‘easiest’ to translate. Next I tried to begin writing up my synopsis, word for word for the whole 4 sentence summary. I quickly learned that emojis do not have tense, and are mostly icons, faces (people, animals), flags and very few actual verbs (activities) or adjectives (unless these adjectives related to a feeling). I definitely depended on ideas (nouns) more than words since these were not part of the emoji symbol system. I went back over and over to my original written synopsis and highlighted just the key nouns and verbs that I thought would be needed to tell the story and scrolled endlessly through the entire emoticon library since the ‘search’ function was too subjective in terms of the results I got back. Eventually I pieced together a synopsis that is quite a bit shorter than my original!
One obvious challenge I had was in the post-production. After I created my story, I tried to copy and paste my synopsis emojis into WordPress, but I must be doing something incorrectly with my settings because when I published them, all the images turn to ?????. After trying different devices (mobile, laptop, PC desktop) with no improvement, I copied my screenshot as an image on my PC and uploaded it. I apologize for the fuzzy quality of the images.
Telling a story using my traditional English written rhetoric felt like a flop. I wrote three different versions of the synopsis on different days, each time trying to search through all the emoticon faces, animals, vegetables & fruit, flags and icons to try to create a better visual metaphor for my synopsis, but I am surprised that ended up creating relatively the same set of visuals. Through my iterations of this ‘story’ I discarded many of the ‘words’ I initially was trying to communicate so my synopsis became shorter and more abbreviated in terms of the story-line I was able to communicate. I now am wondering if I should have tried to create this synopsis using phonetic syllables perhaps instead of sticking to my desire for a more direct ‘translation’ from the word to the image? How would this reverse ekphrasis work? I do not feel that emoticons if used in the way I tried to use them (translation) are ‘up to the task’ of doing more than adding ’emphasis’ to a written word.
I was initially pretty excited about trying out what I thought was going to be the ‘ reverse ekphrasis’ of using emoticons (as images given the task of explaining words). After spending entirely too much time searching through the emoticons available through my whatsapp account, I realize that my brain is stuck or too rigidly tied to a print-bound way of thinking and perceiving how to communicate what I had mentally labelled as a ‘written synopsis’. In my daily communication, I use emoticons quite sparingly and only to highlight a feeling: happy! sad… confused… all faces, and none of the culturally nuanced uses of eggplants and other vegetables. I think I expected that emoticons would be more developed than they are, so I was pretty befuddled for a few hours when I tried to piece together my synopsis.
A new visual language?
Upon reflection, I can see how this kind of ‘language’ if we call emoticons a language, is developing as languages do: in fits and starts, some parts much more developed than others depending on the needs and usage of those inclined to actually create a new emoticon and add it to the ‘lexicon’. Right now I see emoticons are not about syntax and structure or grammar. They are a kind of picture writing, yes, but in very broad strokes and I do not see the context or description they are providing. If emoticons are a kind of picture writing, they are interesting in their deviation from being in ‘service to’ spoken English. Perhaps it’s just due to my lack of emoticon fluency and practice, but for me I felt that there was little narrative power to my use of these emoticons.
Perhaps some of the problem is that emoticons seem to be a mixed bag between ‘icons’ and basic human expressions or items (why are there so many fruit and vegetables?!). I felt the restrictions of this kind of ‘ picture writing’ and could make many links to the context that these emoticons were probably created in: simple expressions of feelings, reinforcement of an idea within a text or email – not telling a narrative story.
I feel that this exercise in fact reinforced what we were reading this week about the power of pictures and verbal text used TOGETHER rather than apart.
