Presenting ideas is one of the most important techniques for a good designer. This technique allows the designers to introduce their design concept or story to their audience. As an important technique for the designer, there are many creative ways for presentation. It's worth mentioning that CCA Story Studio is a course that taught you many different creative ways of storytelling. To make an idea more vivid, storytelling is an amazing tool that attracts the audience with the information you trying to convey, also engaged them into the scenes you are creating. During the spring 2021 semester at CCA, I had learned a lot of useful tools and techniques from the Story Studio. In the learning process, I encounter three big challenges from the course, which are the challenge of telling a story verbally, presenting a story by comic, and creating an interactive story.
Among these creative ways of presentation, verbal presentation is the most common way people express their ideas or story. However, as a non-English speaker, I was scare of verbal presentations in front of people since I worried my terrible pronunciation and use of words would ruin the presentation. These factors caused by the language and culture barrier make me unconfident when I am presenting an idea verbally. In the second week of the Story Studio course, I had an assignment called Exploratory Story: TEDette, which is a short, verbal story done in the style of a TED talk. When sharing the first version of my story, I feel very nervous about presenting my personal story with my group. I worried that my groupmates are not able to understand my story, or they feel confused with my horrible pronunciation or phrases. Although I was struggled with presenting my story verbally, I still want to try to introduce the story without a draft. With only a hint of some words written on the paper, it's challenging for me to phrase the sentence and construct the story. Terribly, I made a lot of grammar mistakes during the presentation. However, it helps my eyes always keep on the audience, allows me to give the audience a sense of involvement. From the feedback of my peers, they like how I have eye contact with them and enjoy the enthusiasm and joy in telling the story. In addition, I also learn a lot from my groupmate's presentation. As well-prepared presenters, they show images, smiles, and confidence in their presentation, which motivates me to make my verbal presentation better.
To help the audience immerse in the story more, I decided to add hand-drawn images of nine holes and Nemo, since I had much good feedback with Nemo in my story as a reference. For the second version of my story, I focused more on grammar and story construction. At the same time, I try to keep the interaction with the audience including eye contact, visuals, and body language. After this project, I become more confident with the verbal presentation in front of people, while this precious learning experience definitely contributes to helping me become a better designer.
As a creative way of presenting a story, a comic could be more interesting than a verbal presentation if your audience is more visual-oriented. After the TEDette project, we were going to create a Character Shift Comic for our personal story, which is a new version of my core story that is told from a different character's point of view and communicated as a comic. As an art lover, I like to paints and draw illustrations. However, I never create comic art before.
While I try to frame the story into 8-grid storyboards, I am able to put the story into those boxes quickly in my brain. But when the storyboard becomes more complicated, that I don't know how many boxes do I have for the comics, it becomes difficult for me to distribute the story perfectly into the grids. What even worse is the time I plan to spend on this comic story project is much more than I expected. The unsuccessful process of comic creation makes me frustrated in drawing the comics. Luckily, I have a group of enthusiastic classmates and a resourceful professor who provides me much useful feedback on how to make my comic better. In the next comic project Origin Story & Product Comic, I applied what I learned from the feedback, and feeling easier to draw a comic for a story. This learning experience from peers' and professor's feedback allow me to become more capable with this storytelling technique-comic.
If the comic is a creative way of telling a story, I would say making a game for a story is an even more creative storytelling technique. Following the comic story project, the next project for our personal story is Interactive Story Game, which uses narrative and user-selected options to allow a player to explore the story by making meaningful choices and navigating their own path. The interactive game is my most interested storytelling technique in Story Studio. However, I also had encountered a lot of challenges during the process of creating an interactive story. Same as the comic project, I did not have experience in creating an interactive game for telling a story, that everything is new and unfamiliar for me. Another challenge is the interactive story requires different endings, which means I need to present different storylines in the games.
One tool I found useful for planing different storylines is the branching schematic. It allows me to extend different branch storylines but still keep the main storylines at the same time. After I finish my interactive story, I find out that the story cannot engage the audience as I expect, and I am unable to find the problems that affect the engagement of my interactive story. Thanks for the helpful feedback that points out the images and the story actions feel separated before I changing the text labels. After the player becomes the main role of the game, the story actions become more vivid and the player can be more engaged in the story.
To strengthen this technique, I revised this project as Refine and Iterate for my personal story. Now, I am able to understand how to make an engaging interactive story.
The three big ideas show the struggles I had when I come into contact with unsure or unfamiliar techniques. Although the challenges I encounter might not be something I like to in touch with or familiar with, the learning experience when I overcome the challenge is the most precious gift I get from Story Studio as a designer.
Link to Process Post: https://etseng1218.wixsite.com/etseng/post/personal-learning-story-process