Project A – Myth, Narrative, Belief
Group 4 (Tangerine Team) Sam, Lidia, Kanya, Jin, Yiyi, Dandi, Xunyao
The Myth (summarised):
There once was a boy named Richard, who loved playing football with his friends. On his 15th birthday, his parents gave him a new smartphone. He was so excited to finally find out what his friends were up to that he started downloading every app he could think of straight away, even missing football practice for the first time. As the day went on, Richard found his favourite app- Instagram. He missed dinner, but he was too focused on pets, jets, and celebs- people his age with millions of followers to entertain as though they don’t have school or homework. Days go on, and Richard’s twelve followers make him feel defeated- why isn’t his life perfect? He misses more and more football practises in the pursuit of followers, but he can’t seem to understand why he can’t have the life everyone else seems to have. Then one day, as he scrolls, he sees familiar faces on the screen- it’s his football team and they’ve just won a match! Without him. Richard wishes he was in the photo too, he wishes he had played the match, and he misses his friends. As though by magic, someone rings the doorbell. “It’s the boys!” his mum shouts. Richard rushes to the door, they’re all standing there with a big trophy in hand. “Where have you been?! Let’s go celebrate!” He looks down at his phone, ready to make a choice, he leaves the phone at home as he shuts the door. His friends hug him tight, and say “happy to have you back!”
Collaborative process:
In starting our collaborative process, we decided to create a shared Google document in which we would brainstorm and explore myths from different parts of the world. As each of us had a different heritage and cultural background, we wanted to be able to use a myth with a message that was universally applicable, as well as being contextually adaptable to our project. Some of our key factors in deciding the myth were the applicability of the story across our target demographic, the relevance of the message to today’s sociocultural world and the ability of our demographic in identifying similarities between the key message of the original myth and our adapted one. With our story, we wanted to be able to highlight the effect on men’s mental health as a result of social media, but also how easy it is for teenagers to be sucked into the false realities presented on social platforms. However, it was also important for us not to make social media the villain (but rather the dependency on it as a bad thing), as we had to consider the immense benefits of online platforms. We decided on Sleeping Beauty as our story, from which our adapted version would reflect on our dependence on social media, when the addiction makes us “asleep” to the real world.
Our group was then split into two subgroups; Lidia, Kanya and Sam to be the research and narrative team, and Jin, Dandi, Yiyi and Xunyao to be the design and testing team. We also decided to establish deadlines for each aspect of the process, as we felt that they would help us stay on track of where we were in the process. This was a really good opportunity to learn about each others’ strengths and areas of improvement as a group, and allowed us to work together while having more creative independence within our subgroups.
We decided to present our final product as a video recording of Richard (our protagonist)’s social media account, as we felt that our target demographic (13-25) would be able to identify with his use of social media apps in contrast to their own. This was an initial decision by the design team, which was then shared with the narrative team for an executive decision on our final product.
In testing our video, we decided to use a survey/questionnaire type testing mechanism, as we thought it would be the most effective. Some of our survey questions were:
- Does this story resemble any other fairy tale/story/myth to you?
- What do you think is the moral value of the story?
- Is the format of the story suitable to narrate our message? (Yes/No)
- What can be improved from this output?
- What do you think this video would be great for? (e.g. school material, educative campaign, etc.)
Our results showed that while most people were able to understand the story and see similarities, some people thought that our video may have been too quickly paced and weren’t able to keep up, or that it needed additional text and captions (and less visuals) to help explain the story better. Thus, we decided to adapt our product based on the feedback given to us through testing.
Overall, this project was a great way for us to be able to collaborate with each other and understand the team dynamic by setting deadlines, being open- minded to each other’s suggestions and using each others’ strengths to create a final product that all of us were proud of in the end.