Linked with Emily Wu
I used to play guess the movie title or song title game using emoji with my cousin all the time, especially during Christmas time. We also challenge each other for guessing the famous Chinese proverbs represented by various emoji’s. It is always the other way around, from emoji’s to words. And I remember I would try different strategies, such as rhyming words, homophones, meaning represented by one or multiple emoji’s, etc. I really struggled when I had to translate a movie, filled with characters, dialogues, different plots, into a series of emoji’s.
Same with Emily, I also started creating my emoji story using the webpage and realized there were limited selections, so I also switched to my phone. Layout is very simple for both blogs. Visual wise, we both chose to make a screenshot of the emoji story and post it on the blog with written reflections on the bottom. This makes the audience have to switch back and forth between the visual and the blog text.
We both started with title. I thought mine was quite straightforward as long as one has watched the movie. I couldn’t really guess her title right away, but I noticed that Emily listed out all the characters in the movie at the beginning, this reminded me that the intro songs in the beginning of a movie usually list out the main casts as well. She also used “+” signs to use multiple emojis to describe a single character. I also listed out the main characters in the title, but without giving too much detail for each one.
I see from her reflection that she had trouble describing the entire movie so she had to omit some parts of the plot and only included the major event. I’m not sure how she did the process, if she remembered the key events from her memory and she used emoji to write out the idea straight away. For me, I actually managed to find a script for the entire movie and I was trying to translate the key words into emoji so I could have a fuller picture. What I noticed was I was literally typing the key words and trying to see if a suitable emoji pops up. This actually reminded me of my personal experience leaning a different language. When my English proficiency is low, and all I did was think, read, and write in Mandarin then translate my best into English. I remember my English teacher used to say, the moment that he knew he became proficient in English was when he realized he was thinking in his mind and talking to himself in English, instead of Mandarin. This makes me feel like my written words-to-emoji translation speaks to the fact that I’m not proficient to express my ideas not using words at all.