For production B, I went with the geo-narrative, which was the second of the two options. I chose doing the geo-narrative over the data visualisation because I thought the end result would look better. Generally I think data visualisations are a lot more impressive then geo-narratives when they are done professionally, but considering the fact I am a first year uni student, I didn’t think that I could make one that would live up to the examples we have been looking at in the lectures and the tutorials.
My geo-narrative is fictional story. The actual concept for my story is a joke. I found it sort of difficult to make the brief descriptions of events humorous because of a text limit for the boxes and I also wanted to keep each scene description as brief as possible, so I just gave all the characters ridiculous names, like Greasy Dean.
The geo-narrative is a spoof of your generic crime drama and follows the events of a thug for hire, named Allen, who has just come down of a crystal-meth bender and wants to get a bit of weed to chill him out a little. Allen goes to great lengths to get some weed and nearly every character in the story dies by the end. The city the story is set in is called Shitsvill, even thought it’s just a map of Canberra. I chose the name Shitsvill because the town the story’s set in is simply meant to be a shit hole.
I started by writing up the scenes on paper and figured out the plot of the story. Then I drew up a quick story bored and with the help of a few of my friends, I drove around a few suburbs taking the photos to match each scene. For the shots where someone is dead or being killed, I just scribbled red blotches on them in photo shop.
For each scene I took several different photos, originally intending for them all to be used for the final project. When it came to placing the markers however, I ended up using only half of the photos. If I went into too much detail for each scene the area in which it happens would be crowded with markers. Even the end result looks a bit crowded if it is not zoomed in far enough, which is a bit annoying.
Mapping out the story wasn’t too hard but it was time consuming and it was a bit tedious having to scroll around the map placing the markers. With all the text, I typed it up on word and just cut and past it once I’d checked it for spelling, although there still is probably some mistakes, which I’ve over looked.
One thing I had a problem with was uploading the pictures to the markers. According to a little help manual thing on Google maps, all the photos have to be hosted on a website before they can be used and you cant just cut and paste it out of Photoshop. I tried to upload all my images to Flickr but that didn’t work either. In the end I used Google Picasa Web. From there I could make an album and easily pasted the URL for each image into the markers.
Once the photos were down the geo-narrative looked a lot better, and I’m pretty happy with the end result. Each scene is numbered so that it is easy to follow the story in the correct order. The link to the geo-narrative is to the right on the blog roll and in case that doesn’t work you can just cut and paste the following:
Big Old Blog 
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