Did you rely more on syllables, words, ideas or a combination of all of them?
The task specified not to write anything orthographically, so I relied heavily on symbols to represent words and partial words. I felt I cheated a little using the (M) emoji to combine with a cup of tea to form a word. It is recurring and essential to the synopsis of the movie. I’m not even sure if it makes any sense to anyone else but myself.
Did you start with the title? Why? Why not?
I started with the title for two reasons. First, it was easy to find emojis to represent the title, and second, having the title at the beginning gives more context to the synopsis. I think figuring out the title is essential to figuring out the rest of the emoji story, for the reader.
Did you choose the work based on how easy would it be to visualize?
I chose the movie based on what I had watched recently and what I thought would be easy to describe in emojis. I was wrong. After the title, the synopsis was actually very difficult to describe only using emojis. I would come up with an idea of how to summarize the movie, but then wasn’t able to find the emojis to express what I wanted to write. Then I changed how I wanted to write the summary, based on the looking at the emojis available to me, but still not able to communicate it completely. It was a long and arduous process going back and forth between these two processes. Using emojis to communicate many thoughts is limiting, interesting, and kind of frustrating.
I completed the task on my iPhone, as it had a wider selection of emojis than any of the online emoji keyboards but this presented a problem. When I emailed it to myself, it was only as large as the iPhone screen and enlarging it made the resolution a little fuzzy. As another cheat and to clarify the figure on the first two rows of the synopsis is a businessman emoji and the emoji at the end of the second line is an abacas. In the end, I hope it makes some sense.
I agree Shaun, I really struggled with my summary, but I thought you were quite creative with the use of the (M) symbol with the tea to form the word team. I am terrible at looking at symbols and images and trying to decipher a meaning. I am a terrible Pictionary play, but I could make out some words in your summary. I found this task quite challenging as well, but I wonder if it is because of the direct translation from words to images that we are stuck on. In you tea and (M) symbol example, I wonder if you had put an emoji of a few people if that would have represented a team better, or would people have thought of this only as a group or a family? Images including emojis can be viewed differently depending on who is viewing it. Maybe had you been talking about the movie with a friend and then followed up later with these emojis to talk about the film, with this background your friend may have understood. Then again, I think the task of putting these emojis together is much more time consuming than just typing the summary using text.
Hi Allison,
I totally agree. I think going back and forth between a graphic representation and a word summary was the most frustrating part. I wonder if we were habituated to using only images for visual communication, and then asked to learn letters and sounds to translate visual image expression to written expression, would we have the same challenges. For me, I went back to the drawing board of how to approach this task a few times, until I got a little more familiar with the emojis available.
Thanks for your response and insight.
Shawn
Are your emojis describing Moneyball (the movie with Brad Pitt)? If yes, I got it from title alone, even though I’ve never watched the movie!
I also found the synopsis really difficult to translate, the complexity of ideas and relationship between them is difficult to convey with just emojis. I think emojis and some relationship words may have helped! e.g. [emoji sequence] after [emoji sequence 2].
This would have just helped give some context where emojis were lacking!
I put all my emojis onto a google doc so that I could access on PC and then printscreen from there 🙂
Thanks for sharing!
Hi Jamie,
You got it! It is Moneyball.
It was a hard task for me for sure. I think, in general, I tend to be more descriptive with written and spoken language. My wife would probably say that I could be more succinct with language. I didn’t even think of the relationship words, as I thought we were asked not to do anything orthographically, so I took that as anything written. As a result, I exclusively used emojis, but definitely a few words would have helped enourmously.
Shawn
Hey Shaun,
Clint and I just watched that the other night, so I got the title right away. Great movie 🙂 Until I read Allison’s comments, I couldn’t understand what ‘coffee + M’ was! Duh, its tea! All about the context, I guess. I’m a coffee-fuelled machine.
Valerie
Hi Valerie,
I could watch that movie anytime and have watched several times. I just couldn’t come up with a way to express team, so I had to cheat with ideas and a letter.
Shawn