I want to examine Alanna’s emoji story as compared to mine.
How has your colleague’s experience differed from yours? And how do you know?
The greatest challenge with the emoji story is that you’re using a limited pictorial system to communicate a story that may or may not be known to the audience. Choosing something that is easy for you to express and easily understood by another person is very difficult.
Alanna’s movie was Mulan and easily guessed by others. Her first line is a visual of memorable parts of the movie: Mulan cuts her hair and goes to war. Once you understand that Mulan is the movie, reading the rest of the emoji sentences is very clear as to what is being described. Although Alanna comments on the limited emoji options forced her to choose substitute emojis, like the fencer, once you know the movie is Mulan everything is understood within that lens.
In contrast to Alanna, no one was able to guess my emoji story. It’s the Studio Ghibli film The Tale of Princess Kaguya.
This is probably an oops on my end for picking a movie that people may not be familiar with. Without recognizing what the film is, interpreting the intended meaning of the emoji sentences becomes very difficult.
What literacies does their site privilege or deny in comparison and contrast to yours?
Something that really stands about with our emoji stories is that literacy is locked behind context. Both Mulan and Princess Kaguya are folktales, but in a Western context, Mulan is also more prevalent given that Disney is in a live-action re-make mood. Disney is more well known than Studio Ghibli.
Alanna and I both highlight the title in the first line which attempt to contextualize the rest of the story. Without this context, the interpretation of the rest of the emojis is up to the reader, rather than as dictated by the author.
I chose to include text descriptions of my emoji stories. I’m not sure if this ended up confusing more people, but it helped me realize that even the emojis that I thought I could identify, were actually something else. For example, the opening scene of The Tale of Princess Kaguya is in a bamboo grove. To represent bamboo, I used the tanabata tree. I didn’t realize this was the case, but it was the closet emoji to what I wanted to include.
In both of our cases, the availability of emojis highlights that the stories are controlled from the author’s perspective. We intentionally select the emojis so that it’s easy for ourselves to express. We also use ourselves as a proxy for the audience. The success of the translation depends the audience’s familiarity with the story and a shared understanding of how to express the story.
What theoretical underpinnings are evident in your/your colleague’s textual architecture and how does this affect one’s experience of the work?
Both Alanna and I had a similar approach to creating our emoji stories. We started with the title, used subsequent lines to describe the plot, and used emoji skin tones to show ethnicity.
We both had a very thorough approach to describing the plot. Essentially the entire movie is explained. Alanna mentions that she wasn’t able to fully express some scenes and had to resort to emoji substitutions.
In my case, I omitted one scene where Kaguya goes back to her home village to meet her childhood love interest. They end up flying in that scene until she sees the moon and the love interest wakes up, as if from a dream. This was a really difficult scene to express because there are two realities to represent AND I thought it would have been extra confusing.
Like Alanna, I thought being as thorough as possible would help readers confirm their understanding and appreciate the story. However, my omission of that one segment was intentional because I didn’t want the reader to get confused by the story. Although that segment is omitted, the overall plot is still intact.
Because Alanna’s story was easily understood by our classmates, the subsequent plot lines are a nice way to reinfoce and appreciate the story in another form. In my case, I wonder if the subsequent plot lines and length just made the experience overwhelming to piece together the emojis.
The amount of information present is important, but I wonder how this task would change if we were challenged to badly describe the plot or describe the plot in the most boring way.
Girl lands her perfect man after she drys her hair, shows off her legs and stops talking.#ExplainAMoviePlotBadly #explainafilmplotbadly pic.twitter.com/6G4v5Ge5xU
— Explain A Movie Plot Badly (@ExplainPlot) December 16, 2019
With the limited emoji language, the overall attempts for translation force us to:
- Selectively include and exclude information
- Design based on how easy it is for ourselves to express the information
- Project ourselves onto the audience