Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Final Project Feedback

Again, I really loved seeing all the creativity and innovation with so many distinctly different final projects. Rose and Bo's "My Heart Will Go On" was hilarious. The puns were out of control at times--wave upon wave of them. And it's obvious they worked really hard on the project while still being able to have fun.

I also though Tammy's idea to make an online trivia game was great. I don't think I ever would have thought to make something like that and the questions were fun, challenging, and intriguing. The videos of her niece and nephew were cute.

I wanted to comment on Camile's project, as it particularly stood out to me. I like the way she incorporated various elements of remixing and hyperlinking that we learned/used over the semester. For example, using internet archive, she was able to use both original text (the poem at the beginning) and original illustrations to add relevance and character to her text, itself a modern and abbreviated rendition of Carroll's original work. The added element of choosing different options was reminiscent of our group project together and was an added surprise to the text. It (the linked storyline options) seems to have a functional role within the text as well in that jumping to either one scene or another allows Camile to include various main scenes from the original Alice in Wonderland without having to make logical narrative connections between all the different scenes.

Camile was able to tell the story in such a way as to keep the essential elements of Alice in Wonderland intact while revamping the story to fit a contemporary context. It was interesting to identify particular characters and scenes in Camile's work with their counterparts in the original. In this regard, the illustrations she included were helpful as well.

I also thought that Camile's transference of Wonderland to New York city was a creative and in fact logical idea. People feel small and lost and confused in New York all the time. It seems perfect. The only thing I would suggest is that 1) the picture of the white rabbit could be re-cropped since right now it is cut off at the top and his head is missing. 2) the page depicting the angry woman in red is spaced strangely so that some of the words run into each other. Otherwise, a wonderful and creative project.