Note: the title for this story is at the very end of this post.
My emoji story, rendered as an image reflecting how it looked on my phone:
The same story, rendered using emoji characters:
Emoji story (for some reason emoji are being converted to question marks when I post to this blog, so I have attached a text file)
For rendering my chosen plot, I chose to focus on using the emoji to represent ideas, and occasionally specific words. I sometimes used the arrangement of emoji pictographically to depict a scene, and in other cases I used them in a symbolic manner. In some cases I appropriated certain emoji to represent concepts that are more abstract and difficult to render through images, but I tried to limit this approach to only a few symbols and to be consistent in how I used them.
I chose this particular story because it was the piece of media that I had most recently engaged with when I began this project. The title of this work is very easy to accurately depict using emoji, so I have chosen to save the title for the end of this post. Some parts of the story I felt were very easy to convey (although the decipherings by my classmates might prove otherwise!), while other parts were very challenging to render in a way that I felt could be understood. Additionally, some details in certain emoji are difficult to visually distinguish on my phone, such as the difference between the closed padlock and an open padlock pictures.
While I was working, I also tried to keep in mind how emoji are rendered differently on different technology platforms, and so I tried not to rely on the specific details of how any particular emoji was rendered, rather than the idea behind it. To assist with this, I often had my phone “read” different emoji out loud so I could learn what they were called in order to avoid misinterpreting the idea of what an emoji is meant to show and to try to anticipate whether a different rendering on another platform might change the image too much from what I intended to show.
While I was working on this project, I also happened to start listening to the Lingthusiasm podcast (co-hosted by Gretchen McCulloch who was featured in the listening resources in Module 5.2] and she and co-host Lauren Gawne devote a significant portion of the first episode discussing why emoji lack the linguistic features required (assuming no future development of a workable grammar) to function as a language on their own.
The title of the story: THIS EMOJI (for some reason emoji are being converted to question marks when I post to this blog, so I have instead used a link to a page for the single emoji that represents this title)
Hi James,
I really enjoyed your interpretation of this move, which is a classic! I found it interesting that you chose to leave the title after the emoticon retelling. Was this because you felt that it would be a giveaway or that the emoticon was too accurate for the title?
I found it very interesting that you chose to use the emoticons in a pictographic manner primarily and then also symbolically. I found that with access to the larger library of emoticons, it was very easy to fall back into a familiar pattern of trying to create words phonetically like a traditional, prose-based story might be. Did you find yourself with a similar challenge? Did you picture each movie scene as a storyboard that you then converted to emoticons or did you find yourself looking for emoticons that represented words that described the scenes?
I also appreciated how you used your phone software to provide you with the intended developer meaning of each emoticon. That was something that I also struggled with. I think that cultural interpretation could greatly change the meaning of these emoticons and is often overlooked. Were there any icons that you think may have a multiplicity of meanings that may misrepresent your movie plot?
Thanks for sharing!
Hi Braden,
I decided to leave the title until the end because I thought it was such an easy title to convey with emoji that it would spoil the opportunity for anyone to try to figure out the movie based on the plot alone.
For each major plot point, I suppose I made a case-by-case decision regarding whether I felt I a more visual approach would be more clear or a more linear presentation of separate “ideas”. Very often I did find myself reading the symbols aloud like sentences with strange grammar. To try to differentiate the two, I made use of double-spacing between separate utterances, so that the close vertical spacing of the more visual depictions would stand out as something to be interpreted differently (although this system fell apart with the very long line in which the ship’s computer says the crew is expendable). I intentionally avoided any attempts to phonetically spell words using emoji names because I assumed that a reader would try to interpret these passages photographically and ironically.
Yes, I agree that cultural interpretations could greatly influence how these emoji stories are interpreted. Originally I had used what looked to me like a stick of dynamite to represent blowing up the ship, but my read-aloud check informed me that the icon was actually a firecracker. Noticing that there was also a black “bomb” symbol that maybe carried a better sense of a large explosion, I changed to that one instead. After, while reading the comments on another classmate’s post, I later learned that the firecracker emoji is commonly specifically used by many people to represent Chinese New Year, something I was unaware of that could have created some ambiguity if I hadn’t made the change. I also struggled with choosing what food the crew should be eating during the dinner scene, ultimately opting for blank plates as generic stand-ins in order to not accidentally draw attention to a specific type of food that isn’t actually important to the plot.
Thank you for sharing your thoughtful feedback!