Project 1: Personal Narrative (counts as a blog post): Students will create a personal narrative blog out of your own life experiences. It can be “based on a true story” and perhaps exaggerated but it should not veer totally into fiction. Students will craft this story using one or more of the narrative traditions we’ve discussed in the first three weeks of the course (Module 1). The narrative will include at least one image, even if just to set the tone. Do not worry about image quality. Students will not be graded primarily on length, but you should write a minimum of four paragraphs for your story, plus a final paragraph offset from the story in which you explain your use of concepts from the course to develop it. Be specific for this section: make sure you identify the exact ideas and concepts we covered by name (e.g. “I worked with kishoutenketsu here when I made the choice to ______”). Due 9/14 at 5pm. Submit your blog link on Canvas before the due date.

Project 2: Textual Narrative (15%): Using source material you have gathered so far (or other any other remixed source material), construct a typographic narrative using ideas/strategies from Drucker’s Diagrammatic Writing and any other typographic work that inspires you (see slides from weeks 4-7).  You may use Illustrator, Photoshop, Prezi, iBook Author, even video. But Keynote/Powerpoint may be best if you don’t have much experience with different softwares, because of the ease of manipulating text blocks and exporting to pdf or video. There should be at least 3-4 panels or pages with a story structure following the Western three-act plot or the Japanese four-act (kishotenketsu) plot. You may use color, various fonts and graphic elements (arrows, borders, basic shapes), but please do not use images. Let the text fragments, their arrangement and typography guide your composition of the story. Provide a one-paragraph, professional artist’s statement that explains your choices and connects them to specific elements of course content. Due 10/12 at 5pm. Upload your project to Basecamp by the deadline.

Project 3: Visual Narrative (15%): In this assignment, you are to use images to tell a story. The images may include symbols, shapes, colors, drawings, graphics, photos and/or video. Your images may be accompanied by minimal text, but images should drive the story.  In other words, you aren’t illustrating a script. Instead, investigate new ways to organize images–on the single page and from page to page– in order to get across your particular visual story, drawing on the approaches to visual narration we’ve covered in Module 3. Remember, the pictorial frame and the user’s navigation of the frame(s) are elements of visual storytelling. Provide a one-paragraph, professional artist’s statement that explains your choices and connects them to the course content. Due 11/9 at 5pm. Upload your project to Basecamp by the deadline.

Project 4: Final Twine Narrative (30%): Over the course of the semester, we have repeatedly returned to Twine as a platform that exemplifies many of the affordances of digital storytelling. For this project, you will draw on what you have learned in all four modules to create a final Twine narrative. You should aim to include at least 35 polished, networked lexia in your final submission. In an accompanying artist’s statement of no fewer than three paragraphs, you will explain how the project demonstrates your mastery of concepts from Module 1 (by using/adapting/subverting traditional forms), Module 2 (by using text, typography, and hooks), Module 3 (by incorporating static and moving images), and Module 4 (by introducing linking, nonlinearity/multilinearity, and branching user choice). Concept and plan due in class 12/3. Rough (but complete) draft due in class 12/10. Final submission due 12/14 by 5pm. Upload to Basecamp.