For your final project, you are going to tell a story across multiple categories of media. You’ve done writing, photography, audio, video and design. You’ve remixed and mashed up. You’ve done big projects and group projects. You’ve connected different stories. Now we’re going to bring it all together in a transmedia extravaganza.
We’ve been using a loose theme of my story/our story throughout the semester. That is pretty open-ended, so your final project could be almost anything as far as the story it tells. That could create a problem of having too many options, which is one of the reasons you have been encouraged to come up with and refine ideas over the past few weeks. Whatever story you choose to tell, make it meaningful to you, and make it something you would be proud to share with everyone you know.
Your final project will be to build a story in multiple interconnected media. What do I mean by interconnected media? We have used several different types of media over the semester – visual, design, audio, video, and remixing and mashing them up. Your project will use at least three of these media. For example, part of your story might be a video, another part might be a series of images, and a third could be an audio production. You would connect the three in a blog post. Or maybe you would pin them on a Google map that gets embedded in a blog post which explains your story. The purpose here is to show that you have mastered several different types of digital media and that you can bring them together in a coherent story.
You are welcome, even encouraged, to work together on your projects, but this is not a requirement. Due to the nature of the assignment, it should not be necessary to meet up in person to collaborate. If you work together you can bounce ideas off of each other and share the work. You can look out for each other and raise each other’s game. Everyone has to blog their own write-ups, of course. You can see each others ideas at http://ds106.us/category/projectideas/ and http://ds106.us/category/ideaspart2/, and everyone’s blogs at http://ds106.us/tag/spring21bond/, if you want to find people to work with.
How big should this be? How long of a story do you have to write? That’s hard to quantify. This is a major project, so treat it as such. Think about the work that went into your radio shows – it should be comparable to that. Think of the kind of effort that would go into doing about 30 stars worth of assignments.
By Friday, 4/23, at midnight, you need to post a progress report. This should, at the very minimum, outline your project and plan. That is, it should show that you’ve started working on the project and that you have a solid idea of where it’s going. Ideally it would feature media in progress. If you are working with a team, indicate who they are. This report could function as your weekly summary.
Post the project by 4/30. Your final project should be in a blog post. You will submit the URL of that to Canvas. It can link to other posts, if it makes sense to run it in multiple parts. All media – images, audio, video, etc. – must be embedded (not linked) in the post(s). The final project needs to be accompanied by a final summary, in which you discuss and reflect upon the project. This could be the same post as the project, or a separate one, depending on what makes sense for your project.
Daily Creates
While you are always welcome to do Daily Creates for fun, you are not required to do any during the Final Project weeks. You are however requested to submit ideas for future Daily Creates on the Add a New Daily Create form. Help inspire the next ds106 crew!