Benjamin Reynhart

For my narrative project, I have been exploring storytelling through unusual mediums. My main inspiration for the project is a series of Photoshop tutorials called “You Suck At Photoshop“, which besides informing the viewer of different techniques and skills in Photoshop, also combines some interesting narrative from the teacher.

The tutorials are often interupted by Skype phone calls or arguments with his wife, and his crumbling relationship commonly provides hilarious subject matter for his tutorials. What I most appreciate about his tutorials, is the way that he has transformed a usually dry and un-interesting subject into a a very entertaining video.

My other inspiration for this project has been from the practice of Codework (click here if you don’t know what that is), involving translating creative writing (usually poetry) into machine-readable code. This area explores the use of our language to present concepts and ideas, breaking down the structure of the works, removing the human-understood syntax and replacing it with machine-understood syntax. This idea recognizes the vast changes that have occured in human/computer interaction.

I was originally going to make this project into a screencast-style tutorial in Object-orientated actionscript, however when I started making it, the project seemed to loose a lot of its narrative qualities, and was not an exploration in story-telling so much as just a slightly bent take on the tutorial format. For this reason, I decided to simply record my process of coding the 7 days of creation, and through sound, a narrator told the story. This is a mix of narrative platforms, and an interesting take on altering the syntax of language.

My project also plays on the idea of instead of just re-writing the piece in a different language, the computer can understand it and do something, create something with it also. The story I choose to re-tell plays homage to this idea, and is in itself all about CREATION.