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In Task #6, I used emojis to describe the plot of a full-length, feature film that I remembered watching when I was a kid.

Reflection:

Did you rely more on syllables, words, or ideas or a combination of all of them?

I relied heavily on ideas to complete this task, rather than specific syllables or words. I found it time-consuming and inefficient to spell out specific words (even if my emoji keyboard did have letters available (e.g., )) and I was unsure as to how I could efficiently display the number of syllables in the movie title or plot to help a viewer guess my movie. 

Did you start with the title? Why? Why not?

Yes, I figured that if the movie title could not be easily translated, it would be next to impossible to translate the entire plot of the movie. I was originally going to select the movie, Shang-Chi, but as I had trouble translating the title, I did not think I would have much luck with the rest of the movie.

Did you choose the work based on how easy it would be to visualize?

Yes, I wanted to select a full-length, feature film with a simple plot. I thought that it would be difficult to explain a movie with a complicated back story or an underlying meaning (such as Christopher Nolan’s Inception).

Other Notable Items

As I worked on this task, several other thoughts came to mind:

• I found it challenging to accurately portray the emotions of characters, using emojis. I was able to use a smiley () to describe happy moments and an angry face () to describe moments where a character was angry, but some emotions did not have a corresponding emoji. For example, I was trying to indicate, at times, that certain characters were up to no good using a smirking emoji (), however, I realized that this could be misinterpreted as confusion or displeasure.
• A challenge I faced with using the Emoji Keyboard (https://emojikeyboard.io/) was that it would not allow me to insert new emojis between existing emojis. When I tried to insert a new emoji, it would simply add it to the back of my script. After this happened a few times, I ended up switching over to Facebook Messenger and my phone to complete this task.
• I found it challenging to not have a search function for the emojis. I had categories such as, “Symbols” and “Objects” but it was still difficult to find the right emoji at the right time. Much of my time on this task was spent searching for the right emoji. Some items had multiple options (such as envelopes – ), but some situations required a bit more creativity to recreate. For example, I had to go through quite a few emojis to describe a move from a home in Africa to a home in America ().
• I found it difficult to recall the full plot of a 90-minute movie and had to rewatch aspects on Netflix to ensure that I was covering the plot correctly.
• The ability to add a legend to my emoji story would have been helpful. I realized towards the end of the task that the number of characters in the movie made it difficult to keep track of everything that was going on. If I was able to define certain emojis or to have a description of the emoji appear when the reader hovered over it, this would’ve probably been more effective to a reader.
• I noticed that moving emoticons between systems presented a challenge. For example, when I copied the movie emoji () over from the Canvas assignments page, it converted into a bunch of question marks (???) in WordPress. When I copied and pasted emojis from Facebook Messenger, they appeared as images in WordPress. This made me think that the display of emojis is not consistent across all keyboards and platforms.
• I found it unusual to use emojis in this context. In my day-to-day text messaging, I use emojis to display an emotion or change the tone of my texts. Emojis were instead, used here, to communicate a plot. Perhaps as highlighted by Bolter (2001), the pictures here were not just decorative in nature and graphics were being used to replace text.
• Bolter (2001) discussed the idea of ekphrasis, using words to describe vivid scenes. I wonder if using words to describe the movie plot would have been more effective in this task. While it certainly would not be able to capture all of the contexts, emotions, and backgrounds of the movie, perhaps it would be easier for the reader to guess the movie.

References

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110