Transmedia Improv

Thank you for your interest in our Cantina workshop. We are currently in the process of developing a comprehensive curricular guide for teachers interested in trying this exercise in their classrooms. In the mean time, excerpts from the guide are provided below, along with a sandbox area for those wishing to experiment with a cantina space. Please leave any comments and suggestions you may have! (As this is still being tested, please report any bugs to webmaster(at)projectnml(dot)org . thanks!).(Note: if you choose to use Star Wars IV as the basis for this activity, we can not provide a copy of the Cantina clip. You will need to rent it from your favorite video store.)

The focus of this activity is to teach storytelling skills relevant to a new media literacy environment. After completing the series of tasks detailed below, students gain an introductory grasp of narrative conceptualizing applicable to a range of digital media modes. Moreover, students will understand foundational principles relevant to telling stories across media formats.

This activity challenges students to think about some of the fundamental elements of storytelling, and introduces them to basic vocabulary terms. At each point along the way, the facilitator is encouraged to highlight many of the issues surrounding new-media that come up throughout the course of the activity as starting points for critical discussions.

Introduction

During this activity, students are introduced to the Cantina clip, a short scene from Star Wars IV in which the main characters enter a space cantina populated by numerous other characters who are only shown for a few seconds each with no character background provided by the film.This forms the basis for their engagement during the workshop. Teachers should let students know that it is not necessary that they be familiar with the entire film. In fact, over the course of the workshop, they will be making their own media versions of this story and thus potentially altering their existing relationships to the film overall.

The clip is highly detailed, providing clues for a narrative that has yet to be established. Students should be encouraged to look for story elements within this framework while considering what remains to be told. Additionally, this section is meant to draw students' attention to different storytelling modes popular in the media today. Students are asked to consider the "who, what, where, why, how" of storytelling, the differences between "real" and "fictional" stories, and their own personal relationships to the stories around them.

Part I

Students are likely to mention in the introductory discussion that media makers find material for their stories from a variety of sources. In fact, in the new media literacy environment, we often base our creativity from other media pieces we have been exposed to. Much new media has been sampled, or reused from someplace else.

For the remainder of the workshop, students will engage in creative conceptualizing, using the Cantina clip as source material for this process. Understanding the concept of sampling and how it relates to authorship is a critical skill in the new media literacy environment. Teachers may want to raise preliminary, age-appropriate thoughts about copyright concerns here. More information on copyright and internet age collaboration, including explanatory animations to share in the classroom, can be found at: www.creativecommons.org/learnmore

The workshop developers purposely chose to use the Cantina sequence from Star Wars IV: A New Hope as the foundation for developing workshop activities. By using curious-looking, non-human aliens as the basis for character and plot development allows for conversations on gender, diversity and multiculturalism without having to talk about specific human races. By mapping these discussions onto other races from other planets, it allows students to express themselves in a non-threatening, broad way. It also allows students to examine the characteristics they mapped onto their individual aliens on the basis of appearance alone, such as Why do you think the character with the big head is smart? or How do you think a ‘spy’ might look?

I. Character

Section I challenges students to think creatively about character development. At the teacher’s discretion, issues of caricature, race, and gender may be relevant here. Teachers may choose to save this discussion for the end of the workshop, drawing on other media examples involving "sympathetic monsters." However the initiation, at some point in the workshop, of a conversation around representing ourselves and others is essential to young media-makers as they begin to identify and articulate their unique voices as transmedia storytellers.

Teachers may wish to think of the next several activities the way "improv" exercises function in a theater class; designed to move at a quick pace, these activities require students to, without hesitation, "get into character," while simultaneously creating imaginary environments and events.

In this first activity students create a 'profile' for a selected character from the Cantina clip. Profile creation is a trend teachers may be familiar with through social networking websites such as Friendster or Flickr; students may already be comfortable with this activity. Students have their first opportunity to fill in some of the missing pieces from the clip as they relate to the characters. Akin to more traditional "role-playing" scenarios, in this activity, students learn to take on a character from the inside out.

II. Location

This activity challenges students to work productively in a collaborative setting, and to employ a basic 'concept boarding' technique as a way to build upon concepts of character, location, and sequencing.

Students will again fill in key story elements missing from the Cantina clip, in this case constructing a series of settings or locations, and the evolution of a plot. Students will use online resources (google, flickr) to find images, an important skill for new media makers. Teachers should prepare a sample search for images based on key words (expanding/combining terms i.e. dog, doghouse, dog world…) to demonstrate to the class.

Students will develop basic sequencing skills as they arrange their PowerPoint slides to begin to explain how their characters moved from one location to the next, ultimately ending up in the Cantina. By focusing on relationships between location, sequence, and character, students will experience the process through which narrative clues are determined across these three key story elements.

Part II

III. Concept Boarding Refinement

In this exercise, students return to their PowerPoint projects in order to add additional narrative elements such as dialogue and sound.

Here students should be allowed creative freedom to integrate sound and written dialogue elements as they wish, however, teachers may choose to show some examples (Completed PowerPoint files can be found at http://projectnml.org/cantina_archive1/node/7 or http://projectnml.org/cantina_archive1/node/5 ). Teachers should draw students’ awareness to the range of possibilities for sound placement within a slide. Teachers also should demonstrate to the class how to draw dialogue bubbles. For students who need more direction, teachers may also demonstrate how to create a dialogue template suitable for written dialogue improvisation:

1. Copy character images onto a single slide.

2. Draw blank dialogue bubbles for each character.

3. Copy this slide 5 times.

4. Students will then trade off writing dialogue into these slides. In the case that fewer than 5 slides are necessary, blank slides can simply be deleted at the end of the section.

IV Story show/reviews

An important piece of media creation, is, of course, reception and in this exercise students will reflect their ideas to the group. This activity is meant to empower the students around their work. However, because each team holds some of the clues to the overall story of "what's going on at the Cantina," this activity is significantly more interactive than traditional "show and tells" to which students may be well accustomed. Students will experience an audience of collaborators, which is again, a concept privileged in the new media environment. Teachers should encourage students to make connections between stories.

V At the Cantina

This activity is meant to build upon the story show and emphasize the interconnectivity of the various stories and characters. Again, it requires that students "become" their characters and interact with each other in order to deepen the multi-media narrative. Teachers should be careful to monitor the dialogue, keeping it focused on relationships between characters (not students!) and how these characters got to the Cantina. Students will have fun while experiencing instantaneous, interactive, multi-author narrative construction; the activity also provides a logical narrative endpoint after the construction of numerous stories leading to the Cantina.