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

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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

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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

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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.


Exploring Immersive Storytelling

In the Storytelling Circle interns are exploring displays and slide shows about the classic principles of all storytelling, while learning guidelines for translating their stories into 3D immersive scenarios for journalism machinima documentaries.  For one of their assignments, they took evening inworld snapshots of themselves in front of a Pixar Storytelling principle that is personally meaningful.  Then they dropped their own written comments about the principle in the Storytelling Creativity Basket inworld.

.Bohrer.C_StoryCircle_2015.09.17 Callahan.initial_StoryCircle_2015.09.13 Greenaway.A_StoryCircle_2015.09.16 Guerra.C_StoryCircle_2015.09.16 Moore.C_StoryCircle_2015.09.15 Ondieki.A_StoryCircle_2015.09.14


Blogger Posting Update

JJIEvw_BlogPost2015.09.09

Just a heads up:  Here is a screen capture of all our interns’ names showing you where to find the links to their individual blogs.  Note we have changed the “Blogs” tab and category to read “Bloggers”.  On that top tier tab page you will find ALL the blog posts by our interns in chronological order.  We have several categories bloggers can check to help showcase each post’s contents.  For example, every intern post always checks off the categories of their own Name and Bloggers, and any other subject category that describes the post, like OpenSim or Avatars or Machinima.

If you want to read about a specific topic, look to the sidebar.  On every page there is a dropdown menu with all the categories with the number of related posts.  Click any category title and you will find all the posts about that topic from both our interns and our Front Page writers.


Instructions to Get Started

Hi everyone,
Here are some quick instructions on how to get started blogging.
– Log in at https://virtualworld.jjie.org/wp-login.php with the account details sent to your email.
– To create a new blog post, mouse over “+ New” and click “Post”
Capture
– Select “Blog” and your name in the Categories section to the right
– Write your post in the text editor on the left
– When you’re done, click Publish. That’s it!

Blog entries won’t show up on the homepage by default, these are more detail-oriented, make as many as you want and detail your experience with this project.

Gwenette will have the ability to promote a blog entry to the homepage, so write them with that in mind!
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me or Gwenette.