Here is my final project.

At least 5 paragraphs, including embedded/linked media, and web links to sources as appropriate. This post should fully explain your project to someone not familiar with it. Suggestions to include the idea behind/inspiration behind it; what does it mean to you? what is the story? what makes it storytelling? Describe the process for the making of, including links to all source media.

The basis of my project was a game the briefly bloomed and died on the internet during February. It lived a fairly short life, even in internet terms. It didn’t make it very far past tumblr.  You can read all about it on Know your meme, it has all the info you could ask for on the subject but if you feel like you really need to know even more I recommend the wiki. You can see some examples that people have done here on tumblr. The gist of it is that you go to mapcrunch.com and play the game. You select “hide location”, make sure you have all countries unselected, and click go. What this will do is drop you in a random part of the world. It’s as if you woke up on the side of a road in an unfamiliar country. The goal of the game is to find your way to an airport so you can return home. There is a bonus hard mod, which is how I always play where you don’t use outside sources ( including  google maps to figure out your location from signs or landmarks).

Using this as my inspiration I decided to tell a story of sorts. I dropped myself in the middle of what I suppose was China. I took about an hour and a half of footage and strung it all together. I did hit a bump here. First I didn’t really know how to use my screen capture at first. Then I was limited to 10 minute segments at once. Followed by that, I couldn’t figure out the video file formats. The real problem was that my internet went poopy right in the middle of one segment. I was forced to reload the website and therefore was dropped into a whole new location. Because of that there is a point right in the middle of the video where we are suddenly relocated but I think I worked it in well. There were times when googlemaps had to catch up to me and resulting in back peddling in the video, it would suddenly relocate me 10 clicks behind were I was just at. But that turned out ok too in the end. I think the final problem I encountered was putting the pieces back in order. I began the project sometime in March and reorganizing the 10 minute segments was a bit of a puzzle. Anyhow it is time for class now so I will bbs.

Ok, I am in class now. Hey Alan.

Anyhow. As I was editing I found a sweet 9 minute sound clip of a street. I think it was a street in London. I laid the audio on top pretty simply. I also changed the visuals because I wanted it to seem more like a dream and less like a google map adventure. Of course it begins abruptly because you were just dropped into a random country. It also ends abruptly but I wanted to leave the ending sort of open. My person finds a bus station and train station and after that you can think of what happens. The story was also purposely left vague because I thought that it would be easier for a person to fall in line and imagine that they themselves were on this adventure. I wanted them to feel as confused by the experience as the poor lost person.

I enjoyed seeing a bunch of different cultural things during the recording process. There is a lady with a pug, the cars sometimes were on different sides of the road. There were times when seasons and climates changed quickly as I clicked. It was pretty cool to see. I recommend that even if you don’t find your way all the way to some form of transportation, you might find it fun to walk around (like a mini mini vacation.)

All in all I liked how it turned out. I did spend what felt like a million years recording in google maps though.