The first problem I had with this task was recalling a movie, book or TV show I watched recently I presumed for leisure. I vaguely remembered the kids watching this movie while I was in the background cleaning up the other day. I looked it up and tried my best to express the main plot but encountered challenges in that I did not use any punctuation so the exercise felt like one gigantic run-on-sentence! I suppose I could have used punctuation but I didn’t for some reason. It felt like a mixing of mediums and I wanted to stay true to the visual arts as much as possible. Since I was looking forward to working on this task, I jumped right into translating the synopsis and only at the very end did I reread instructions and realize I forgot to translate the title. I chose this movie because it was a very visual film and I figured it would be easily conveyed through emojis. Little did I know, I was restricted in expressions and confined to the limited emojis available on a couple of emoji websites. In some instances, I had to find the closest approximation that would require a bit of a stretch to the imagination. Also, conveying the plot through visuals boils it down to its essence and descriptive details are essentially omitted. The passage of time and narrative power is not properly established as discussed by Bolter (2001, p. 59). He also mentions “ekphrasis” and “reverse ekphrasis” (p. 56) but I employed a process where a visual was summarized into text, which was then reinterpreted into a different visual medium. Referring to this new synopsis, it would appear that my emoji story paints a choppy picture through logographic nouns and verbs that express distinct sentiments that will likely be interpreted differently by multiple readers. Finally, it took me longer than expected to complete this task because I surveyed all the emojis in search of the “perfect translation”.
References:
Bolter, J. D. (2001). The Breakout of the Visual. In, Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410600110