Creating a scripted story

'Protection' Brainstorm

After considering the stories that I recieved from the first part of the assignment, I decided to focus on the protection aspect. Thinking carefully about what image to use as the fourth, I decided to think about the word protection...one of the first images that popped into my head was CCTV. With 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain I thought it fitting that these protective devices were my fourth image.

Target story: a sense of protection.

CCTV cameras

Relating this assignment back to Roland Barthes who says that "all images are polysemous", it is important to understand that although they all have a lot of underlying messages, some images have been chosen deliberately to provoke a certain response. It is clear that with careful consideration of images we can control what others see but it is important that in the first instance the message we want to be portrayed is what others read from the image.

Thankfully most people picked up on the protection aspect. Although they received the same images as the previous group, the fourth image seemed to allow them to describe things in more depth. The more you looked at the images the more you could try and decipher from them but by adding a fourth image, I was trying to narrow the message taken away from them. Below are a few examples of the story's I received.

n: June Paton
a: 70
g: Female
o: Retired



n: Martha Grubb
a: 75
g: Female
o: Retired



n: Emilie Ranaivoson
a: 19
g: Female
o: Student
"It's the story of this little girl who was watching a tape her mom filmed on camera, while she was going to a costume party as a knight. but because her costume was a bit too heavy, and messy, she got stuck on the fence and fell. To make her feel better, her mom gave her fruit."

These responses were all valid but were not what I was looking for so I decided to order the photo's for the next participants to see whether that would help alter the response.

n: Ross Lesslie
a: 22
g: Male
o: Student

n: Qing Ye
a:20
g: Female
o: Student

n: Lin Ma
a: 20
g: Female
o: Student

n: Angela Laing
a: 46
g: Female
o: Catering Assistant

It is clear that careful consideration of images can result in controlling what you want others to see. I was a little unsure if people would pick up on the idea of protection when creating their stories and my thoughts were confirmed with the first few responses but by altering the order in which people received the images I was able to change the reaction.