Week Two – Writing Noir

There was a whole lot of writing for this week, intercut with the daily creates.  The ones I ended up doing were the Spacecat, which was some goofy photoshop work, the yodel, and the picture of my eye.  I like how the daily creates are rather random; they’re just little quick ways to do something creative when you’re feeling it throughout the week.

It took forever to find a synthesizer image that was at the angle I wanted.

Lacking a webcam, I quickly learned to just download the mobile apps for Flickr and SoundCloud to streamline the process of uploading their respective daily creates.

Out of the writing assignments, my favorite was definitely the character dossier.  I made a character, named Jim Sardic, who is a private investigator in New York, but with something of a twist on the formula.  I thought up a world around him that would be a lot of fun to work with and write about, so hopefully we’ll get to do more work regarding the characters we made this week.  For the “Change An Ending” assignment, I went with Hemingway’s The Killers because it was the most open-ended story on the list.  I like how it was all very ambiguous as to what Ole Anderson did to get two hitmen after him, and the story that led to the end-game we drop in on.  Here’s my alternate ending, which I suppose is more of an extension to the story.  Writing the story was a bit frustrating once I realized WordPress did not want to cooperate with my formatting.  I wanted to match the format of The Killers, indenting each speech shift and new paragraph.  Unfortunately, WordPress messed up the formatting and deleted all my indentations.  It’s still readable, but I was disappointed in the restriction of format.  As for the other writing prompt assignments, I did what was essentially converting a real news article into one you would see on The Onion, and a Haiku version of a recipe, describing Sardic’s favorite meal for when he takes a new case.

I already did a bit to customize my site last week, picking out a theme to run with, but I added to it this week.  I changed the default background image to something I put together for Sardic’s story, and changed the site’s title and front page to something less generic than “Digital Storytelling Blog”.  There are still minor things about the theme’s setup I would like to change, but I’ll have to look into it’s php code to make the changes I want.  That may take some time to look through, but hopefully it shouldn’t be to difficult to change to my liking.

Well that’s all for now.  Here’s hoping we will be working more with these character dossiers.