melomart

This is a Netflix movie I watched one evening.  The movie felt as if it was part one of a series as the trio didn’t complete their journey yet.

For this task, I started with the title of the movie first which was called The Last Airbender.  I did this because it allowed me to use a few of the ‘staple’ emojis throughout my story, such as the air emoji and the arm bending emoji.

A few things occurred as I was completing this task.  First, I realized that when I was typing out the plot in draft, I had more words and the paragraph was half a page.  However, when I used emojis to type out the same plot, it looked surprisingly few.  Visuals convey the idea without the additional salutation we would normally use 🙂 Two emojis such as the airplane and boat stood for the entire sentence “the trio traveled many distances by air and sea.”

One emoji can represent an entire sentence without the use of articles such as the, a, and, or to combine sentences and give it a variety of length.  Other words such as “one day,” “in the beginning,” and “all of a sudden” were difficult to translate into emoji and therefore it was difficult to set the tone and feeling of the story.

Another thing I encountered was that I had a hard time avoiding periods in my emoji sentences or paragraphs.  I felt I needed them so that I know where one idea finished and when another one began.   I would continually re-read the emoji story in my mind, but in full sentences.

I also realized how difficult it was to find emojis for abstract concepts such as the word element.  I relied on an emoji to relate loosly to an idea.  For example, I used the caterpillar emoji to represent soil because the insect lived in the soil. A thought that kept revolving in my mind was that I related a visual to a thought of what it would represent in MY mind and used it consistently in the story.  But unless I tell the reader what the emoji stood for or give an emoji translation key, the emoji sentence might not make sense.  It’s like someone trying to learn another language.  For example, if you wanted to learn English you would need a translation key in order to learn the letters of the alphabet first and what each letter sounds like before putting words together in a sentence.