The plan:

  • Where: I plan to do a trip to Hornby Island (maybe Denman or Quadra instead). The island is so close to my hometown, the Comox Valley, but I hardly visit because I don’t ever have a reason to, and life gets busy so the idea is never followed through with a plan. I hope to use this assignment as my motivator to actually make the plan and visit the island. I will not scout the location beforehand because, one, it is too big of a commitment to just pop over to scout, two, I have been there before and have a relative idea of where and what I could go/ do, and three, I plan to make my story about the spontaneity of the trip- no big plan, just see where the wind takes me throughout the day.
  • Equipment: I will need my car to get me to the island and to explore different locations. I may spend the night in the back of my car to have more time to explore the island, so I will probably bring a foamy, blanket and pillow. To incorporate various types of media, I will need my phone to take photos, videos, and audio recordings. For photos, I might bring an actual camera as well to get higher quality photos. I will also bring a sketch pad in case I would rather draw a scene instead of taking a photo, or in case I don’t have the opportunity to photograph or film the scenario but I feel it is necessary to provide a visual representation for the story. To keep me company and maybe add to the story, I will potentially bring my brother and/ or dog along with me.

What will be the shape of the story?

  • My story will be based on the main character, me, trying to find a location that I went to when I was younger, a lookout cliff that brought me this immense feeling of calmness and escape after my childhood dog died. Now, I want to revisit this spot since I am older and have different issues that are causing stress in my adult life, the only problem is I don’t remember the name of the place that I went or how I got there; all I have is the memory of what it looked like from when I was younger, and the feeling that it brought me while I sat alone looking out at the view. The story will go through the adventure of me trying to find this location while I explore the island, finding different cool places along the way, and sharing my emotions throughout the process. I want the readers to go through the suspense of trying to find this meaningful location, reading the experience of making the decisions of where to go, where to start, how I got there solely based on the memory from when I was there when I was 11. The story will start when I am getting off the ferry, feeling excited for this adventure, and it will follow along the adventure as it happens in real time, going through the decisions made, the results that occur, and the emotions, and seeing where the day takes us (hopefully to the intended destination). Throughout the story, there will be flashes of my memories from when I was on Hornby at age 11, and sharing the meaning of the places and the emotions I felt when I was there last.
  • I love exploring and going on adventures with no destination in mind, just seeing where I go and what views I find, preferable the ones that aren’t easily accessible by the public. So when I read the details of this multimedia story assignment, that was my idea of an adventure. For the purpose of the story, I felt there needed to be more connection to the story, a ‘why’ for my exploration, so I chose a location with some meaning to me. I had to sit and think for a moment as to where I could go that would allow me to go on an adventure that had meaning that was also accessible to do in the next two weeks. Eventually, I decided on Hornby because it checked a lot of the boxes, and I have been looking for a reason and opportunity to go. I want my readers to go through the experience of this adventure and feel like they are with me making these decisions to find my intended destination. This is why I have decided to make this one of my exploring adventures with no set plan of where I will go and what I will do, I just have a general goal to find this place and we will see if I will be able to find it on my own; no help from maps or people really, just off my memory and maybe some signs. I hope to narrate this process as closely to my actual experience for my story and I will incorporate multimedia to add depth to the experiences and feelings that occur on this trip (images of the places I find, videos of the options I have to make, sketches of the people I interact with- or any locations that I am not able to photograph-, and audio recordings of the sounds I hear). The plan of incorporating my memories into the story is to provide context and meaning into the story and the places I go, providing more emotional connection to the readers. This will also hopefully provide suspense for the readers to uncover the location that has so much meaning to me and finally see what I have been trying to describe throughout the story from my memory and feelings from that day when I was 11.

What kind of media will you produce? How do you plan to integrate the media in alignment with Mayer’s Principles of Multimedia Learning?

  • Using multiple modes of media, incorporating textual, visual, and audio, makes the information given more memorable to readers/ viewers, as mentioned in Mayer’s Principles of Multimedia Learning. I plan to use text, images, videos, audio, and potentially drawings to incorporate all key aspects of multimedia to make my story memorable. With the textual portion of my story, I plan to keep the language casual, following the Personalization Principle, to engage readers more and make the story more memorable. As well, I will use narration in my text along with image, using the modality principle to make the story be effectively memorable. The audio will be used to put the readers into the moment, listening to the sounds that were around me in the moment that the story was occurring. Adding images/ videos will add a visual to allow the readers to better picture and understand the scenarios.