W5 | Generating A Story

Before I draft out my storyline, I watched few films to gain some inspiration and to further understand the "substance" of those films. That included Black Mirror's Fifteen Million Credits episode and Entire History of You. After watching, I understand that films always say a certain message to tell without being overly direct. For example, the substance that I got from Fifty Million Credits at the end of watching the episode is that people value a higher life when that's the only option given to you, greed will be the determining factor over their humanity/values. Whereas the other episode, "Entire History of You" I notice that I need to have this kind of substance in my story, and I tried to branch out my ideas from here.

On this page, I was thinking on the possible substance that I can tell/showcase as well as reflecting on the black mirror episodes. I decided to based on the thoughts of "what if I'm the uploader/predator" and "If I'm a content moderator, am I able to go on?" to create my storyline. In my head I can visuallise this scene where a character is running away from something, be it the user or the content moderator. This was inspired by a music video called "Wolves" by SIAMÉS, where the characters are running away from wolves that are metaphorically their problems; the more they run away from their problems, the more it will come back and eat you up, and eventually it'll get too overwhelming if you don't fight back.

I thought of different scenarios to tell the story of content moderators in an indirect way, still conveying a hidden message, just like the episodes of Black Mirror and as well as the music video. The initial idea was based of having the thoughts of them having "just a regular day at work" where a character is going through the office and seeing what colleagues are going through but this storyline will be quite slow and uninteresting. Although so, the base of the thought is still considered. I continued branching out my thoughts with a mind map and try to connect the dots of what inspires me to do this project, which are the Animated series/movies I've watch such as Ghost in the Shell, Sword Art Online and Black Mirror as well as all the references I watched for research.

I started to draft out what I want to see as a starting of the showcase, which is the subconscious mind floating out as a cyber-dive into the net then branching out the possible development of the "chase", why is the person getting chased and is it the user, uploader or the content moderators? Which in this case a "Silent Hero". This "Cyber-Dive" is inspired by both Ghost in the Shell franchise and Sword Art Online cinematic world, I've always really like this whole idea of a Virtual Reality in the storytelling and I would like to use it for my storyline too. After figuring out who is getting chased, I wander into what is chasing the person, which are the explicit contents. I need a kind of build up to allow users to understand why are these people "Heroes", who are they fighting and this scene will demonstrate it. Before finalising my thoughts from this mind map, I looked through what I've jotted down and finally found the substance I was looking for, which is " The innocence of the world is forever gone". The reason I felt that this is the perfect representation of what I want to tell is that, I can't possibly solve this traumatic experience as a designer but I do want to raise curiosity of these group of people because they are often neglected although they are serving a vital role in the media industry. To tell their story in hopes of spreading their silenced voice, an expression of their life; where their innocent perception of life is robbed. A constant loop of feelings that has no where to go stuck in a world that is incapable of turning back.

One of my main looping life inspiration is based off another vocaloid music video called "Kagerou Days" where the story is about 2 person's life constantly revolving around seeing each other dead on the same day, nothing can be done to it to break the curse and the way the visual storytelling in the music video really enhanced my thinking for my project. There's a lot of consider and learn from it because the short cuts of the animation are all quick and easily understandable instantly.

//STORYLINE

This is the final version of the storyline. The character will be perceived as a user at first. She picks up her gear for the cyber-dive and she discovers a whole new world, but suddenly she is being chased by the explicit contents that is trying to infect her. When those harmful contents are about to reach her, Silent Heroes stepped in. Being so glorified outside of reality, from 3 onwards, the scene is showing the reality of things when the scene turns dark but the character remains glowing. The following of the story is signifying what content moderators go through such as being monitored, having panic attacks and confusing decision making and accuracy scores decreasing. Hence, corrupting everyone's mind one by one and flooding the character with their suffering. Shocked and being awaken from the dive, her glow is still there, but when she took off her gear for the dive and put it aside, she turned towards her computer and suddenly her glow turns red as well, signifying she has been infected and it is another day at work (She is a new content moderator).

In conclusion, what is seen cannot be unseen.