Tuesday 25 February 2014

OUGD406 Welcome to Nightvale Analysis

As mentioned in my previous discussion post, we want to create a exaggerated news website where the written tone of voice is the perfect mix of authority and craziness. Something that I have enjoyed for a while is the Welcome to Nightvale podcasts which come close to achieving this. they are told from the perspective of a small town radio show, with a presented with a smooth and strangely comforting voice. However, what is being related is strange disconcerting and bizarre at all times and can get quite dark, yet it is all treated as the most normal thing in the world, which is really what makes it brilliant. 
They also have wonderfully entertaining tweets and Facebook updates which really make my day.



What really makes these work is the way that they keep you hanging. The short snippet of oddness leaves you wondering if you imagined it slightly and definitely makes you want to seek out more. this could work just the same for our idea. We could also apply this to printed work which just has snippets of articles with a web address or hashtag or QR code that leads to the rest of the article.

We agreed we would need to make some way of generating the ideas for the story augmentation and we decided on creating a big repository of words to stimulate this. Something that welcome to nightfall does is take sayings and expand on them until they make no sense, so we could add sayings to to mix as well just to add more strangeness.
I think I will go on to look at the syntax and writing style of a proper news article so that this juxtaposition of tone and content can really be achieved.

The choice to create something comedic really fit in with the research I did into viral campaigns and the way that positive emotions are the most common to lead to content sharing.

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