First Lesson
–REFLECTION–
Yes i have finally uploaded all my lecture notes.Now let me continue with my reflection.
Today we had our first storytelling in the freezing room. Luckily my mind was still able to function despite the cold gusts of wind the kept blowing against me. Location production class had trained me well.
I must say I was not exactly looking forward to storytelling. I had expected it to be like Written Communication. The module that I had abhorred very much. I was all prepared, ready to brace myself to go through another torturing semester of a similar module disguised under a different name.
However when Ryan told us that it’s not anything like written communication, maybe except for the fact that we do write, I was delighted. Furthermore there was no need for citations. The best two phrases I would love to hear at every class, “No citation”. Oh how glad I was to hear those two magical words. It made my day. Finally I can start writing descriptive/narrative stuff and almost anything I want. There would be no evil citations to limit my creativity anymore.
We started off the lesson rather interestingly. We formed a circle and had to play a game. That immediately brought back some nostalgic thoughts of primary school days where we formed a circle and played what I would consider very lame games now. We had to come up with adjectives that start with the same letter as the beginning of our name. We had a few interesting ones in our class such as sexy Sean, jolly Jueyi and even a Marilyn Monroe.
The game got me intrigued about wanting to know what else is there to come in this class. Almost everything seemed out of the norm. We even had to create a blog and that will be where we will submit all our assignments.
I liked the approach of the lessons. It was a relaxed and fun atmosphere and I did not feel unnerved one bit. It helped a lot when we were trying to write a story that he gave us to write in class. It started off with the following line:
“Jueyi puts on his can-can girl outfit and enters parliament”
While trying to write the story a thousand and one questions clouded my mind. Firstly how does a can-can outfit and parliament go together. It was absurd. However with a little help from my muse I was inspired to write a story that enabled me to connect them.
We also learnt that stories are part of our daily life, that almost anything can be a story; be it games or the usual novel. When I heard that games could actually be stories I felt that I had been given insight to some profound knowledge. I mean seriously who would have thought that games are actually stories. After delving into that, I realised that the very basis of developing a game is by starting out with a storyline.
A good example would be role-playing games where you are either some dragon-slayer or some hero off to save the world form some doomed destruction. Without a storyline the game might not have a structure and the player would be at lost what to do.
The fact that I was awed by this information made me realise that I probably haven’t finished playing much games as I usually jump right into it without really bothering to read the storyline and knowing what I was supposed to do or go. I was very enlightened.
The one thing that bothers me is the fact that we have to write in present tense. I am not exactly a big fan of writing in present tense. I prefer to write in past tense. However learning to write in present tense will be an interesting experience for me.
We were told to write in present tense, as it is more effective in evoking the audience’s emotions. This is especially true for screenplays. It made me realize that writing stories and scripts are not really that different as they both do only one thing-Tell a story.
Thus overall, the class was very much enjoyable and I look forward to it.
