Creating our own stories

On our second day of the Lens Based Media week we explored story structure and in groups developed our own stories (and storyboards.) All stories have a beginning, middle and end - most stories follow this structure: introduction of characters, then the problem/idea/realisation, then there are several obstacles and struggles to overcome before the ending resolution. Before creating our own stories that used this structure we had to come up with characters and settings. In a group of four we were asked to fill an A1 piece of paper with a selection of different drawings. First we were asked to draw characters from people that we have met or seen - I drew several people from my past such as my primary school teachers, strangers I've seen and people that have stuck to my memory. After this we were asked to draw people from our dreams which could be fictional - for instance I drew an octopus man from a dream I had in my past. As well as people we were asked to draw places which intrigued us, made us happy and things that scared us. After all our drawing time we had covered the entire page between the four of us.

We were then asked to create normal lives for these characters by picking a character and then a place from one of the other people's drawings on the table. This meant we had to give an every day routine to each character so for instance give them a job which will give us more insight into everyday lives. After this we were then asked to create stories for several characters we had given normal lives to using the universal story structure. We did this within our groups.  Over our drawings we created 3 storyboards (18 frames - 6 per story) and within the frames we filled our stories in a visual form. Our three stories were called: "Mirror worm," "Venice Villain" and "Miss Latin"

Above are two of the storyboards drawn by other people in my group but the story was a collaboration. The first (to the left) is a story called 'mirror worm' which is a story of a worm that lived in a mirror which face another - he liked looking at his reflection however one day a man walks in between the mirrors and so the other reflection was blocked. The mirror worm gets mad and calls out angrily at the man to move - however this leads to the man breaking the mirror the worm is in. At first he is sad but soon realises that the shattered mirrors casts more reflections and he isn't as lonely. The second storyboard (to the right) is titled the 'Venice villain' and features a bank robber that stills money and on an escape stills a gondola and takes of down the canal- however in the end he is caught by the police.

Above is the storyboard that I created with another girl from my group. This story was named 'Miss Latin' - The story is about a women that is repairing the roof of a church, however whilst she was repairing the church it started to rain and this rain came inside because the roof was not there yet - and due to the wet conditions the structure she was creating for the roof kept falling down  and ruining her hard work. And because of this she became angry and frustrated that she stopped working for a bit. Soon the sun came out and the light braking through the clouds shone through the glass stained windows at the top of the church's peak - the light created hundreds of different coloured shapes all over the church's stone floor - this only occurred because the roof was not there. She realised that there was no need to hide this beauty. I really enjoyed creating these stories and characters because of the freedom we had to do so - furthermore I also liked working as a group and finding out the different ideas that others had to contribute (which I would never think of.)