In the first couple of Informed Practice lessons, we were introduced to our assignments, particularly the essay we’ll have to write. During the guest visit from Katerina Athanasopoulou, I decided to create a new art bank account like last year, for me and my coursemates to have constant access to links and resources mentioned in class:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tD_OwFH2A5aig73TtqIorqeStOyr5O2Ztuu_FioBpLE/edit
After that, we started discussing ideas for essays. My first idea was writing something on long-running franchises, as it fascinates me how certain characters can exist for decades without ever falling out of the public eye. I made a quick mindmap to brainstorm how series can last for such long amounts of time, and discussed it with the class:
I included some ideas of how certain series have stopped from going stale: from having disconnected stories under the same name or world (e.g. James Bond movies, Power Rangers shows), to testing out different mediums for storytelling or rebooting the franchise to adhere to younger demographics and try something new.
For homework, we were then tasked to think of some questions on our topic, find some resources to show our research, and pictures showing examples of our ideas.
https://padlet.com/nplowman/dak7nyuvljps7655
I found some interesting books and resources in the UAL online library that touched upon points I was interested in writing about, and included them. Other than that, I simply expanded on what I mentioned in my mindmap.
The project seems like a daunting task at the moment, but I’ve always been fairly good at writing essays, so I’m not quite worried.