JRPictures wrote:Victin wrote:JackAlsworth wrote:That's how Unpublished Works, well, works on TVTropes. If it's not published anywhere (that includes on the internet), you can put it in Darth Wiki and attach it to the Unpublished Works index.
I see. When will it be published?
When I have the proper funds and equipment to make it. So really it's after I get out of school. It's rather ambitious so it could take a while.
The Finch wrote:If I could make it, I would. I swear, this show/series actually sounds interesting!
Thanks for the positive feedback. I knew people would find this show interesting. Especially when it's concept hasn't truly been done before.
JR -- Wow, that looks awesome! I love the concept of trope-savvy characters interacting, and helping people to learn about tropes in the process. I've been wanting to do that ever since last year, when my own life situation became so convoluted that I turned to tvtropes to help make sense of it, and even where we're at in history, with knowledge-saturation, but so many archaic structures, like most forms of school, still spoon-feeding people irrelevant information rather than challenging them to learn and grow and engage in Character Development.
I'm interested in how a No Fourth Wall, trope-enriched approach could be applied to a reality show or documentary series, as well as alternate reality games. I've tried to do this with my own life, recording hundreds of hours of video journals, considering my decisions and options as I have scoured the internet for information and to meet people to collaborate with on a production project that involves tropes, interactivity, and helping people to learn things that could be relevant to their lives.
So many people spend so many hours enrolled in school, and for what? Setting up a learning environment based on a narrative structure, such as this, could be so much more effective and engaging and fun. Beyond learning, I think ARGs and other reality/trope-based media could have substantial application as a form of therapy and brain training in general. It really is like blending fiction and reality, but keeping the reality part of it intact.
I've started to find others promoting this life-as-story approach. For example, Donald Miller has a whole book/conference/web-site for people to think of their life as a story that they play a role in co-authoring, not just experiencing and reacting:
What is Storyline? [2m]
http://vimeo.com/34677357"If you were watching your life as though it were a movie would it be interesting? If you think about it, we are all stuck in the theater of our minds watching our story unfold. And too many of us couldn't care less because our story is so boring. Screenwriters and novelists have figured out what makes a story interesting and the same principles that they use to write engaging novels and movies can be used to make your life a story worth living."
Anticipated Conflict [1m]
http://vimeo.com/46317495Donald Miller wrote:"Most people hate conflict and avoid it like the plague, but those who have gone through the Storyline process know that conflict is the best friend of everybody who wants to live a great story. For each of your ambitions, you'll encounter conflict. Remember, Stephen Pressfield says that if something beautiful is trying to come into the world, there will be an equal and opposite resistance.
Those who understand the Storyline process learn to appreciate conflict. I don't think any of us like it, but we certainly know it makes a story better. Conflict is hardest when we don't expect it, so in this module, we want to anticipate any conflict we might encounter heading toward our ambitions. If we are planning to run a half marathon, anticipated conflict might involve fear, laziness, physical pain, or procrastination. When we write these things down, they won't surprise us when they come up.
Another thing you'll want to do with this module is consider the redemptive aspects of each area of conflict you anticipate. Perhaps the conflict will humble you, or make you more organized. The conflict might make you stronger or give you better character. Remember, Victor Frankl says, when we find a redemptive perspective to our conflict, it ceases to be suffering. Reflecting on what's good about conflict will take the sting out of it, and make the road more level. You can learn more about why we should anticipate conflict in module 7 of the Storyline guide."
I'm interested in how those ideas relate to people's progression through school, and simply figuring out who they are and what to do with their lives at different points. I've been trying to apply principles of story to my life for over a decade, but it's been tough not knowing anyone who has had the same interest, and not knowing where to find them. My brother actually graduated from film school in 2006, but he now drives a cab and delivers newspapers, and I've never been able to get him to collaborate with me on my ideas. Last year, my life really hit a point of being
Freakier Than Fiction, and I turned to TV Tropes to help make sense of things, cope with an avalanche of problems amid becoming broke and facing homelessness, while I struggled to communicate my perspective to others, and figure out how to collaborate on a kind of production project that had never been done before, but whose pieces were all around me.
I was inspired by a number of other sources, like anthropologist Michael Wesch's Visions of Students Today project, where he asked students to record their life from their own perspective, to gain insight into what students really thought of school. His team edited the results into a video collage, and a mash-up video:
http://visionsofstudents.org/ -Many of the students were dissatisfied with school, as might be expected. But even educators are more and more questioning why they have so many disengaged minds in their classrooms, only wanting to know what the need to do to get the grade, in a world saturated with information and opportunity, as well as problems to be solved.
TEDxKC - Michael Wesch - From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-Able [18m]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeaAHv4UTI8"If you think of this world on fire metaphor, and think we really need to get our youth ready for this, how do you think we're doing this? This is my class at Kansas State University... and you can see they aren't really engaged. There's actually a real test you can do for this, to find out how engaged they are... and that is, pay attention to the questions people are asking. A good question is something that leads people on a quest, and if you pay attention to the questions that students are asking in this environment, they turn out to be questions like this: How many points is this worth? How long does this paper need to be? What do we need to know for this test? These are like the worst questions around." -- he goes on to compare his disengaged, passive class to a photo of excited people standing outside American Idol auditions. The point is, there are times when people are engaged in something, like times in this ARG, and times when they aren't, like many times in school. Yet people pay *so much* for school, and it very rarely helps to facilitate Character Development.
Meanwhile, I see a change in the kinds of entertainment that are possible. The long form of television series has opened up new depths of narrative development, and Youtube and TV Tropes open up even more possibilities, not to mention ARGs, and now MOOCs, which allow many students to collaboratively learn.
Future Learning - Sugata Mitra [3m]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqsTD4CzRYM"Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University, talks about how his Hole in the Wall Experiment helped poor children in the slums of Hyderabad, India teach themselves English."
That Hole In the Wall experiment makes me think -- by word association AND analogy, of the whole Wall Will Fall concept. Instead of English, we're learning tropes! And maybe some other things in the process. I think the idea can be expanded even further. I have so many references and links to share, but I'm trying to figure out how to present them in a meaningful sequence, rather than just
Infodumping.
But I have a bunch of real-life dialogue, even video, and tropes identified in it, and I'm haunted by this explanation from my brother about his scraping-by-as-a-cab-driver lifestyle:
"it doesn't just work out -- there's another step that I was never taught, on how to like, translate, or how to make that jump from doing well in school or whatever, pursuing my interests, to making those interests actually financially viable... and, you know... now it's sort of... I was thrown into this weird ??? and it's like, "now you need to cover for yourself..." and if my passions have to take a back seat to day-to-day responsibility, and having a home for myself as opposed to "you can stay here for a month, but then you have to to get the f*ck out and figure it out for yourself, then those things are going to have to take a backseat for a while..."
So many people get dumped into the world without the tools to make life interesting. I think tropes can help us all to Take A Third Option in more situations than traditional education ever could.