Brainstorming & Concepts
GENESIS
- Getting Started with your Project
This section includes resources to help you develop and initiate your project. You will see templates, idea formulations & ways to applying these resources to both formalize your content AND transition your ideas into a storytelling process.
It's easy to simultaneously not know where to start AND go off on tangents with tryin to brainstorm, so when thinking about how you should start your media project- the best advice is to not overthink it. In this section, we'll review 3 methods to get started with story development: The 5 W's, the bulletin board, and the "Start with the Ending" method.
Approaching your project with 5 W's is an excellent place to begin. The 5's are often taught as a means of story analysis, but in focusing on the who, where, when, what, and why breakdown of your ideas, you can start on the right track. As the most basic premise to help begin your process, you should consider these questions as a bridge between formal academic writing, and narrative storytelling or digital essays. See the headings below of questions that can help steer your media project:
WHO
Who are the people within this story?
Who are the people affected by this story?
Who are the people that will / should tell this story?
WHERE
Where will / did / should this take place?
Is this universal / regional / hyper-local?
Where did this come from?
WHEN
When did this happen?
How long has this lasted or existed?
When might things change / end?
WHAT
What is the problem?
What happened?
What can be done?
What do / did you think, about it.
What is the solution?
WHY
This is the most important step.
You should ask yourself, why are you telling this story / information?
Why is it important to you?
Why should other people care about it?
Consider your assignment as a digital story and stories can be told in countless ways, but your story needs structure and the following tools are ways to help frame your structure.
A bulletin board, sticky notes, note cards whatever objects you want to use, the bulletin board method can be effective as a means collecting thoughts, scenes, ideas, quotes, etc and getting it all out there so that you can sort out the material and group ideas together. Sometimes this method can be chaotic, but it can also be the highly collaborative and a good starting point.
Use an Outline and follow the basic premise of state, support & explain.
see example
Record a verbal narration as you might describe it to a person telling them about your idea.
You can use your laptop, your phone, or any audio recording device to record yourself telling your story, but then listen to how you describe it. (this should be between 30 seconds to a minute) Share that recording with another person, and if it flows well, and makes sense to them, then you're ready to move on to the next step.
If it doesn't, clarify what is missing | confusing | and/or needing further explanation.
Once your recorded description is solid, transcribe that into text, and add details to your explanations, descriptions and/or references. Approximately 1 minute of talking should translate into about 2-3 pages of double-spaced text.
This method is pretty self explanatory, because if you already know how it'll turn out, then you can work backwards to develop the storyline and the pieces involved. This process uses the same tools and techniques as before, but there are 3 essential components to make this effective.
You should have a scene, question, or feeling that the audience should leave with, and this is most common when creating something like a Call to Action video. The idea in establishing these parameters is that you can build up to this concept from a sharply different tone.
You should identify a problem, or problems, that lead to this ending, and with those problems they progress from either choices or solutions individuals make, or that may naturally develop by outside forces influencing the components that help to reach your conclusion.
You must think about solutions, either ones that do work, ones that might work, and solutions that won't work and try to incorporate those as themes into your narrative.
The worksheet below helps outline components, but the process begins with an ending, and you simply work backwards.
