Assignment 4 – 481 – Audio Chapters

30 points
  • Assigned: Tuesday,  September 8, 2015
  • Due: Monday, September 14, 2015 By 6pm

Telling stories means thinking about how to best tell a story. You might have a great character or situation or idea, but the magic is in the telling.

One way to think about stories is to break them into scenes. For example:

  1. She’s on the farm and people don’t understand her.
  2. A mean woman wants to take her dog
  3. She runs away
  4. She tries to come home
  5. Something awful happens
  6. She wakes up in a new place
  7. She meets some very colorful little people
  8. She walks down a yellow road (where lots of scenes happen)
  9. She meets the wizard
  10. She goes to get a broom
  11. She defeats the Wicked Witch
  12. She goes home

Obviously, within each of these are more details, and you could break it down even further. But what’s important is that it makes logical sense. Writing works in similar ways, but in multimedia we have to work in linear scenes. And each scene needs to logically follow the previous one. Our viewers can’t back up if they are confused, so we need to be clear. It DOESN’T mean we have to be dull, or boring, or predictable however. SURPRISE is a good thing.

I want you to listen to a radio piece, and then break it down into scenes.

Perfect Moments at TheMoth.org

*A word of warning, the story deals with some very personal and sad issues*

As you listen think about how he organizes the telling of the story and why.

Email me a list of the scenes before class. Just a simple list of how he organized the story and how it is broken into scenes or moments.