Category: ~Goals

Project goals & milestones

Project’s Centerpiece: Christopher Thomas Story Published & Discussed on Georgia Public Radio

Crime Report Christopher Thomas cover story 2106.11.02

Today, almost a year after we started this special JJIE Virtual World Journalism Project, we published the centerpiece of our student labors, the story and the machinima mini-documentary video: Christopher: A Child Abandoned, Deprived & Imprisoned. It was published on the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (JJIE.org) and simultaneously by The Crime Report housed at the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Both publications have a national reach to both general audience and those most interested in youth justice issues.

The finished story and machinima speak to the truly amazing work of the 11 students at Kennesaw State University, who did all the digging through thousands of pages of documents and traveling the state of Georgia for key interviews. All with the hope that Christopher Thomas’ story could be told widely to prevent him from being hidden from public view in Georgia prisons, which too often act as our country’s Gulags for young men of color.

You can hear a synopsis of the story at Georgia Public Radio’s (GPB) Second Thoughts program, where host Celeste Headlee interviews Kennesaw State University professor Leonard Witt, who oversaw the project, and project student Anastaciah Ondieki.

Project supervising professor Leonard Witt (left and far right), Georgia GPB Second Thoughts radio show host Celeste Headley (second from left) project student Anastaciah Ondieki (center) at GPB studio.
Project supervising professor Leonard Witt (left and far right), Georgia GPB Second Thoughts radio show host Celeste Headlee (second from left) and project student Anastaciah Ondieki (center) at GPB studio.

Christopher committed a crime at age 14, there is no doubt about that, but professor Witt says, “Really the story the students uncovered shows in great detail the failure of all of us in our society to find a way support our most neglected children. If we treated these kids differently, with compassion rather constant punishments, their outcomes might be much different.”

Christopher Thomas still has one more chance for the Georgia courts to amend his 40-year sentence thanks to the work of Stephen Reba, director of the Barton Law Center’s Appeal for Youth Clinic at Emory University. Reba has been trying to find justice for Thomas for years. Of course, we will keep everyone posted on that outcome.

Until then, thanks so much for watching this project unfold and special thanks again to Gwenette Writer Sinclair, who oversaw the virtual world sections of the project and to the Kennesaw State University students, including: Claire Bohrer, Kassidy Callahan, Kevin Enners, Ariel Greenaway, Cristina Guerra, Jourdan McGhee, Camille Moore, Anastaciah Ondieki and Jackson Walsh.


Our Team Meets with CNN Atlanta

Two weeks ago, Edward Thomas, the Product Manager of Mobile & Emerging Technology at CNN invited the JJIE Virtual Worlds Team to present the project at CNN.

At 11 a.m. today, seven members of the JJIE Virtual Worlds team, along with Publisher & Executive Director of the Center for Sustainable Journalism (CSJ), Professor Leonard Witt, CSJ Executive Editor John Fleming, Metaverse Strategist, Designer and Trainer Gwenette Writer-Sinclair, and JJIE web producer Christopher Hayden presented the result of a semester of hard work and dedication.

The primary goal of this presentation was to introduce our work to CNN producers, perhaps with the prospect of doing further collaborative experimentational work in the intersection of virtual reality and journalism.

Here is how we envision a partnership could work:

  • The Center for Sustainable Journalism would bring together college students, providing them with educational and experiential opportunities, as they work with virtual reality immersive journalism projects in collaboration with CNN.
  • In ongoing collaboration with the VW team, CNN product managers would provide the VW team with concepts based on CNN’s specific needs in the exploration of virtual reality storytelling techniques.
  • The VW team would design virtual world interactive scenarios and immersive journalism experiences, and then come back to the CNN team for critiques and collaborative improvements to reach project goals.
JJIE Interns Present to CNN atlanta
Seven JJIE Virtual Worlds student interns (left to right; Jackson Walsh, Kevin Enners, Camille Moore, Claire Bohrer, Cristina Guerra, Ariel Greenaway, Anastaciah Ondieki) at the CNN Center.

At the beginning of the JJIE Virtual Worlds project, Professor Leonard Witt said,

“If we do excellent work, we will get recognition.”

Based on the interest of CNN, one of the world’s largest news organizations, in considering a long-term relationship with the virtual worlds team, I believe it’s safe to say that the team did excellent work, which clearly paid off with recognition and possible future collaborations.

Next Steps

  • The Christopher Thomas story is still a work in progress. The long text story needs to be edited once more before presenting it to CSJ editor John Fleming for possible JJIE publication. Furthermore, the machinima story, which was the initial, sole end product of this project (wow, how that has changed), must be re-edited into a final draft before its public debut.
  • The machinima “Forgive” is also a work in progress. Students Jackson Walsh and Cristina Guerra will continue to collaborate with Gwenette to complete their creative translation of a teenage girl’s poem to an emotionally evocative machinima.
  • Student researcher Claire Bohrer will continue to conduct research around this project to determine the effect of virtual worlds journalism versus textual journalism on an audience.

As we wrap up our main Christopher Thomas Story and our Forgive machinima, we are eager to see how many more doors can be opened and partnerships created with this ever-expanding project.


Break Week = Focus Week

Although this week is called “Thanksgiving Break” by Kennesaw State University, the JJIE Virtual World interns are certainly not abiding by the regular, relaxing procedures of a student vacation break.

Since last week’s fourteenth group meeting, the team has been constantly busy with the project’s deadline in site. At the start of the project, December 2nd was noted as the day the entire project would be finally and fully brought to fruition. It is the day that the compiled long text story will be fully written as a first draft; the day the machinima will be nearly complete; the day that the project will be even closer to its completion and its university debut in January.CollageThis week and last week, each group had a specific focus.

As the  journalists finish their individual story segments, the journalism team looks forward to what the full long text story will look like: from the writing to the pictures and the entire presentation for publication. Collaboration on segments, photo gathering, and Christopher Thomas family interviews is the group’s main focus right now.

The machinima team built the court room last week, which will be a main scene in the final machinima. Last week and this week, the machinimist’s main focus has been filming and editing.

During last week’s group meeting, the PR team was set on searching for grants. This will be their main focus as we head into our final weeks of the project.

Overall, the team knows that their work is not yet finished. So this “break” has been used as extra time to further the project’s progress as we approach our final deadlines.


Pushing Forward

Our JJIE Virtual World thirteenth group meeting  was similar to last week’s meeting. We all arrived at the Center for Sustainable Journalism at 9AM and then split up into our specific groups. The main incentive for today’s small group meetings was simple: push forward to complete the remaining tasks to create the most effective presentation for Christopher’s story.

Meeting13_1e3
Last Friday at 6PM, all the journalists submitted the draft of their individual segment to Professor Witt. After reading through each segment, Professor Witt replied with comments on what they could add to or revise in their stories. Facts. That was the initial step to drafting the story. Now, emotion must be added, along with even more facts to present an in-depth story about the life of Christopher Thomas. The journalists will be reading and exploring how other similar news stories are structured to gather ideas for our own story. After discussing writing strategies and additional people to contact for context, the group decided upon a deadline for the final drafts so that Kevin Enners can begin merging the story segments together. The deadline for the next long story draft of each segment is November 14. Until then, the journalists will be drifting back into the unstable world of a boy who was incarcerated at age 14, and remains in jails still at age 30 serving his 40 year sentence.   They will explore deeply enough to tell the true story of his young, troubled life and explore the question of why his legal quest to reduce his sentence has not been successful.

Meanwhile, in the virtual world, the machinima team continues to build the avatars for the machinima story and build sets. Although the team has already created some avatars for the Pawn Shop scene, they continue to work on them, adjusting wardrobes, skin tones and body shapes to create realistic avatars that visually work well together and with the set. The machinima team had planned on filming today, but experienced problems due to a conflict between a recent firewall update and the virtual world Firestorm viewer, so filming was postponed until later this week.  The team did successfully record more soundtrack voices, mainly  characters re-reading some lines for sound and accuracy. Cristina Guerra continued to work on the inworld scenario textual graphics and credits for the machinima. At the end of the day, the machinima group realized there is still much work to be done as they continue to press on towards completing this compelling machinima story.

Realizing the potential for the continuation of this entire virtual world journalism project, Professor Witt has urged the public relations team to both promote our project’s machinimas and written stories, and concurrently look for possible grants for future funding. At today’s PR meeting, the group focused on finding more contacts in both areas. Public relations contact spreadsheets are being completed for the top-ranked schools and programs in Journalism, Film, Digital Media, and Gaming. The group is also researching foundations and corporations with established relationship to digital media schools and virtual reality, to discover possible sources for grants to fund the expansion of our virtual world project. The project press release deadlines for the Public Relations group are coming quickly, so the completed contact spreadsheet is due on November 20. Grant source research needs to wrap up by the end of November, with query letters to possible funding organizations going out in early December.

Thus, together or apart, the “divided” groups continue to work as one. This project is nothing without the journalists who have tracked down contacts to gather the information and find photos to ultimately report on and write the full story. The project is not complete without the machinima team having the knowledge of how to utilize this information gathered by the journalists to bring Christopher’s story to life in a virtual world machinima and where people can live out the story themselves. And finally, this project would never come into the public eye or have an opportunity to expand without the public relations team’s research, widespread media campaign, and grants that could support and maintain it past this semester.

Pushing forward, each group plays a major role in the successful completion of this project.  All of our creative work together is bringing us closer and closer every day to completing our project goals.


Group Efforts for Team Success

The twelfth group meeting at the Center for Sustainable Journalism went rather differently from past group meetings. For one, the group wasn’t expected to be at the Center until 9AM, as opposed to our custom 8AM arrivals. However, this later arrival time was surely not a reflection of decreased motivation nor any lesser work for completion of the project. Rather, this later hour should be viewed as an extra hour of sleep so that each team member would be even more prepared to carry out the numerous tasks that the project still required for completion. Another major difference in this group meeting was the meeting format; rather than meeting as an entire team in the conference room, each member separated into his or her specific group upon arrival. Thus, each group focused on specialized tasks to progress towards the project’s completion.

Journalism
JournalismCollagee

With the Friday deadline approaching, the members of the journalism team were hard at work, writing their individual segments for the long text story. As outlined before, the individual segments are broken up into five major events and time periods in Christopher’s life: His childhood (from age 1-11), his behavioral problems and numerous foster care placements (from 12-13), the crime (age 14), Christopher’s case and trial, and lastly, Christopher’s current status, habeas corpus and case progression with his current attorney, Steve Reba. Focusing on their particular segments, the journalists’ time consisted of making phone calls to gather further contextual information, reading through the documents to confirm the facts were straight, and pulling out quotes from interviews to add to their segments. Although it is just the rough drafts that are due on Friday, the team hopes to have a more concise outline of the full text story so that Kevin Enners can start merging all of the segments together for the entire long text story.

MachinimaMachinimaCollagee

While the journalism team was researching and writing for the long text story, the machinima team was inworld on the computers, working on getting the virtual Pawn Shop (the scene of the crime) ready for filming. In addition, the team completed the creation of the avatars for all of the characters in the machinima story. To add to the virtual world story, the team also collected more items for the machinima onto a platform inworld. Furthermore, Eric Nelson launched the creation of a more straightforward layout for the script to enable more effective recording. Piece-by-piece, the machinima story is coming together as the team prepares for filming.

Public Relations
PRCollagee

As the journalism and machinima team were establishing the story in text and inworld, the public relations team was focusing on promoting the project through funding in person. The team met with JJIE’s grant writer, Erica Honeycutt, who spoke about how to approach creating a grant for the project. Erica provided the public relations team with tips on grant-seeking basics: to know your mission, to determine what kind of support you are looking for, to discover who is interested in funding virtual reality, and to decide which foundations, corporations, or programs best fit with your mission. For the next week, the PR team will be researching and creating a list of potential contacts that may be interested in funding the project.

Although the members of the Virtual World Team were separated into various groups this morning, the project continues to be a team effort. Moving forward, the journalism team, the machinima team, and the public relations team will all be working as one to bring light to this story and the workings of the Juvenile Justice System.


Project Goals Expanding

The dire urgency for the need to complete numerous important tasks during the tenth JJIE Virtual World Team Group Meeting was expressed in Professor Witt’s meeting agenda sent via email on Tuesday, October 20. The e-mail reflected the importance of structured task lists necessary at this point in the project as we approach the end of this Fall semester internship. Our meeting followed the agenda precisely as follows:

8:00 to 9:00AM — PR Prep & Journalism Reflection & Planning

KidCopPunchTitlePgScreenGrabCLEAN
Preparing for the team’s first press release of
“The Kid, The Cop, The Punch.”

PR —
-Get machinima, “The Kid, The Cop, The Punch,” PR ready for distribution Wednesday & Thursday
-Polish release text for release, add logos and photos
-Assemble email and social media lists
-Plan strategy distribution strategy

Meeting10_2e
Journalism Game Plan

Journalism —
Determine:
-What do we have?
-What must we still get?
What pressing questions need answers?
-Who is on what?
-Recheck our deadlines

 

9:00 – 9:30AM — Guest Speaker Chantal Harvey
Meeting10_7eChantal Harvey, expert Dutch machinimist, visited the team via Skype to show some of her recent machinimas and share suggestions to improve the quality of our team’s  machinimas. Chantal commented that she was impressed with the Machinima Team’s first work “The Kid, the Cop, the Punch.” She answered several questions we had that we will implement during the production of our next machinimas, “The Christopher Story” and “Forgive: A Poem”.

9:30 to 9:45AM — App Update
After Chantal Harvey signed off, Derek presented the web and mobile app he had been working on with Soloman Negash, Executive Director of the Mobile Application Development (MAD) Center and our project app expert. Developing an interactive app to for one of our machinima is part of our project’s original grant proposal. As a Computer Science Major, Derek Maier has html coding skills.  He put them to good use creating the draft version of an interactive app that allows people to walk through the machinima story, making decisions at critical action points as if they were that person. Their choices will be polled and they will see what other viewers chose.  The group discussed the  possibility of creating another app from the same template that would be an interactive quiz about Senate Bill 440 (SB440).

10:00AM: Discussion with Tom Rawlings & Pete Colbenson

Meeting10_6e2
Tom Rawlings (left) & Pete Colbenson (right) discuss the case with the team.

Right after the app presentation, we met with Pete Colbenson and Tom Rawlings.  Tom is currently practicing law and previously served for over seven years as Judge of the Juvenile Courts of the Middle Judicial Circuit.  He was also appointed as Georgia’s Child Advocate for the Protection of Children by Governor Sonny Perdue. Since Tom has had so much experience in law practice, he was able to answer many of our questions about Christopher Thomas’ case and trial. Tom helped us to think of more questions for the lawyers and judges involved in the case so that we can better understand each aspect. Furthermore, he helped direct us to lead themes for our Long Text Story, from trauma to parole.  He explained essentially how the world’s perspective of children has changed since the time of the crime, and how that would affect those past decisions if they were made today.
Pete Colbenson, who has been so deeply perturbed by this case, has recently contacted Steve Reba to ask if he can make certain efforts to help Christopher. As our project comes together and more people become involved, we see that we truly do have the ability to make a difference in CHristopher’s life. From what Pete and Tom were suggesting, our project may bring significant attention to the injustice of the highly enforced SB440 laws and parole issues. We could end up helping a lot more juveniles than we originally imagined.

After a long, busy group meeting, we concluded once again that we still have many tasks to complete to accomplish all of our goals. Many of these tasks can be attributed to the fact that our goals just continue to grow. Our original goal of giving a voice to juveniles in the Justice System has grown to include highlighting major questionable aspects of Georgia’s Juvenile Law.  More and more, we have come to realize that these bigger goals call for a substantially larger workload. Although we are all very busy with our jobs, classes, and other activities, I hope that we can all agree that this is the time to come together with resolute diligence as we advance towards our goals. The call is out for additional dedication to completing our individual tasks. I hope that we are all saying one thing: Bring it on.


A Race Against Time

Meet8_Collage2e
As routine, the Journalists, along with some members of the PR team, were back at the Center for Sustainable Journalism at 8AM this morning for the eighth group meeting. To begin, the team reflected on the progress of each of the individual tasks that Claire Bohrer had assigned them the past week. The tasks focused on re-reading the documents, finding more information, and contacting interview prospects. Although we did attain a lot of valuable information, as Camille Moore found great articles from the Augusta Chronicle (Augusta, where the case occurred) and Jackson Walsh found extra SB440 information, we were unable to track down as many interview prospects as desired. It seemed that we were stuck. However, that’s when we had to remind ourselves that we are never stuck – just slightly set back. Unfortunately, with this project, we don’t have a second to waste.

To lighten our hopes and bring everything into perspective, investigative reporter, Jim Walls met with the Journalism team right after the group meeting to give insight on investigative reporting. He introduced us to many helpful sites, which we can use to find contacts, and having reported on criminal cases before, he gave us some great information about the Juvenile Justice System. Furthermore, he agreed to help us research the address of the interview prospects so that we can more easily find all of these locations when the journalists take their next step: a trip to Augusta, GA.

Flashback to the meeting – [sidenote: a flashback is so appropriate, as there will be several as part of the final machinima story]. After discussing the individual tasks of each journalist, we focused on the long story draft that Kevin Enners has begun. We discussed the need to highlight significant parts of his life and to ultimately show the instability of the youth’s life due to his many foster care placements and school changes. We also emphasized the need to tell the story with facts so that we can leave it up to our audience to decide what they think about the case. Furthermore, we discussed the need for additional knowledge from experts in the following fields: foster care, juvenile justice, medicine, etc., all of whom are additional interview prospects being added to the list. From this discussion, we know that the best, most honest way to tell a story is through good reporting, which is why our goal is to obtain as many perspectives on this case as possible.

After the long story talk, we transitioned into the presentation of the Machinima Script. The Virtual World Team has worked long and hard to put together a script, complete with characters, dialogue, and specific ideas of camera angles. At this point, with the script written and the scene of the crime (the Pawn Shop) already built, they are ready to continue building all of the pieces that will bring this story to life, virtually.

At the very end of the meeting, the PR group discussed their next moves. With an Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook created, it is now our responsibility, as a whole team, to get our project’s name out there. The more attention brought to this project and this entire story, the more successful we will be of achieving our goals to give the youth in the system a voice, to shine light on the injustices he faced throughout his whole life, and to highlight the consequences that can befall any misguided youth who stumbles through any rough upbringing and eventually into the Juvenile Justice System.

The most evident problem that is looming over all of our heads is lack of time. The ticking of the clock becomes louder and louder every day. The fact is, we need more time: to contact people – to find people – to interview people – to track down all necessary pictures for the machinima – to build the machinima – to record all voices- to implement our PR campaign. Yes, we need more time. Unfortunately, this is simply something we cannot have. For that reason, we must pull together to not only finish the project, but to complete it to the best of our abilities so that we may give this story and this youth justice.


Dissecting the Documents

Meeting6_Collage2
Picture this: Complete silence in a room full of 12 dedicated interns, working hard as they search through their documents to find the most significant parts of each one. With each important fact they uncover and add to the collaboration sheet on GoogleDocs, the closer they become to unraveling and effectively reporting the noteworthy story that could change the life of this particular youth, as well as the lives of many other youth across the country.

If you pictured this, and felt it – with all of these imminent emotions of the substantial impact of this project welling up inside you – you may have successfully visualized and had a slight sense of the sixth JJIE VW group meeting that took place at 9AM today at the Center for Sustainable Journalism.

Now – to have an idea of how we got to this moment of pure collaboration and document absorption, let’s take a moment to reflect on the meetings that had occurred just hours earlier. Before the group meeting today at 8AM, the Journalism group met to discuss the next steps regarding interviews, while the PR group met to discuss social media plans. While the Journalists were working on locating contact information of interview prospects, the PR group were working to make this project more prevalent in the community and beyond through the establishment of Facebook and Twitter accounts. In addition, the Virtual World group met yesterday, Thursday 9/22, to discuss the machinima for the CT story. After many hours of discussion on how to approach the story and how to produce the machinima, the group seems to have created a more precise outline of how they plan to display the story via virtual world. All in all, every single one of these tasks that each group is taking on are extremely important, and will ultimately work hand-in-hand to successfully expose this story to the world.

This brings us back to today’s meeting – where this hand-in-hand collaboration could be clearly observed. Today’s group meeting consisted of reverting back to each of the documents, and choosing the most significant quotes, moments, and facts from each. With each noteworthy finding, each intern took the time to enter the date, document #, description of event, names of people involved, quote, and any other relevant information into a neatly-created GoogleDoc spreadsheet, prepared by Gwenette. The intention of this spreadsheet is to make it easier for the machinimists to find the most important information and art clippings from the story to include in the machinima story.

As GoogleDocs continues to be our medium for information collaboration, we all learn something new every day about the importance of organization and communication. Furthermore, every day, we all take one step closer to telling the story of this incarcerated youth, to making his voice heard, and possibly even magnifying the injustices of his case and in the Juvenile Justice System just enough to make a difference in this particular youth’s life, and more.


Commitment

Reading through the CT Story documents, I believe that we all have begun to realize just how crucial our coverage of this case is. Not only is it significant for this particular project’s goal of giving a voice to the marginalized youth in the Juvenile Justice System, but it is also extremely important for this particular youth who may have been neglected a fair deal in his original trial.

Professor Leonard Witt, the Project Coordinator, reminded us all of the extreme importance of this project through an e-mail he sent out to the group today. Among the strong words he used to express the magnitude of this project’s relevance, Professor Witt used the following words to ignite the motivation for our commitment to the project: “If we do our work right, [the youth] will finally get a fair public hearing, which might be life-altering for him. If we do it right, it will also be life-altering for all of us. Rarely in your life will you get an opportunity to do something that can so profoundly affect another person’s life. And beyond that, because [his] story is representative of thousands of others like him, the story’s magnitude is expediential in importance.”

It’s true. If we commit ourselves to “doing a great virtual world rendition, doing a great journalism story, and doing great public relations, all will elevate the project to get the attention it deserves” – Leonard Witt.

For this JJIE Virtual World machinima project, good is not good enough. Despite our countless other obligations, we must realize the significance of this case to this boy’s life, and to the numerous other youth who could stumble down the same path. If we want to make a difference and really bring justice to this case and many others like it, we must commit ourselves now. For the next twelve weeks, we must be willing to push past our limits to devote our time to a cause that is bigger than any other personal obligation. If we truly dedicate ourselves to this cause, then these next twelve weeks could be some of the most rewarding ones of our lives.

It’s time to make a difference. True commitment begins now.


Organization & Collaboration

CollageFiles3e
Today’s group meeting started out with a much-needed talk about the organization of the project’s activities and documents.

Gwenette led the first thirty minutes as we all took a step back to talk about the valuable information on this very JJIE Virtual World site, as well as to review the strict schedule. We discussed how to post and organize blogs, how to locate and read the calendar on the site (located under Project Info tab), and what needed to be done so we can meet our deadlines.

A major eye-opener for many was the September 30th Machinima Content Deadline. This is very important to note, as it means that the Journalists must have relayed all of the necessary information on the CT story that will be going into the machinima. Although we do have an “emergency info add” deadline for any missing pieces that must be in the virtual world story, the strict deadline is September 30th.

Furthermore, we discussed the events that the Public Relations group will be coordinating:

  • The earliest event, coming up on Wednesday, October 7, is a live, inworld music concert produced by the popular Hypergrid Safari Tours group. They run weekly hypergrid tours across the Opensim Metaverse for crowds of up to 20+ die-hard hypergrid explorers and music fans. We will be hosting their October 7, Noon to 1pmET, music concert on our very own JJIE Virtual World Welcome Workshop region’s Beach Music Stage. In addition, that same Wednesday morning,  Nina Camplin, an artist and machinimist from England, will be our guest speaker during our group meeting.
  • Our Wednesday, October 21, classs speaker, Chantal Harvey, a professional Dutch television producer, animator, machinimist and machinima festival producer from Amsterdam, will be sharing her creative techniques and virtual world machinima tips with our team.
  • Looking ahead to our final project showcase – it will be held in the Media Lab of the Social Science Building at Kennesaw State University, December 2, 2015 from 4:30-7:30. All KSU staff and students are welcome to attend.

After PR talk, we discussed our source materials for next machinima story writing and scenario creation: the CT Story documents received from Steve Reba.  We decided that everyone should be familiar with the case in order to commit themselves to the project. Claire Bohrer, the Journalist Producer, divided up the documents amongst the twelve interns to read through and give a detailed summary of each assigned file. Via GoogleDrive, each team member has designated pdf files to read and correlating templates for notes in which to record his or her findings. The deadline for the completed summaries is Monday, September 14, 2015 at 5:00PM. After all the document summaries are submitted, every group member must go back and read through the every summary (or full pdf files) to become familiar with all aspects of the case. During our group meeting on Wednesday, September 16, we plan to discuss the key points of each document. Along with the summaries, we will be recording interview/avatar prospects, significant locations, and important event dates. All of this information is relevant to both the Journalist Group, who is writing the story, and the Virtual World group, who will be building the machinima scenario.

When it comes to inworld assignments: Gwenette has prepared our Week 03 & 04 assignment, involving researching Creative Commons licensed, emotionally evocative visuals, then uploading, framing and displaying them inworld. The assignment is due on Tuesday, September 15. These skills will be important during our creation of the graphics and inworld special effects for both the CT Story and the “Forgive” poem machinimas.

At the end of the meeting, we all split up into our groups to discuss and assign tour specific tasks. Although we may be in three separate task groups, there is no doubt that we will all be working collaboratively to make this project a success.