As simple as it is, I love the “A Snapshot Of A Story” assignment. I grew up loving mythology, and I always wanted to share that love with my friends and families but anyone who has tried to explain a myth in any detail knows it can be a long-winded affair. This prompt made me distill down the myth of Aphrodite’s birth into a short but still elegant poem. In the original myth, Aphrodite was born from the foamy crest of a wave that formed when Cronos killed Uranus and threw him into the sea, making her, the goddess of love, one of the oldest gods in the Greek pantheon.
Someone who inspires me is Gary Vaynerchuck because he is brutally honest about how life is and how you need to be in order to make money and live the life you want. He doesn’t care about what others think of him at all and he preaches that you shouldn’t care what others think and to me that is very powerful and inspiring words. One of his quotes that is my absolute favorite is “Look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, what do I want to do everyday for the rest of my life…do that.” – Gary Vaynerchuk. This is my favorite quote from Gary because it tells you to do what you want to do and do what makes you happy.
This assignment I chose is called A Snapshot of a Story where you have to create a haiku about your favorite myth, legend, or tale. I chose the 5 second rule because its a very funny rule that many people follow sometimes, myself included, even though it is completely false. Here is my haiku on the 5 second rule.
Food falls on the floor.
Pick it up in five seconds.
It is safe to eat.
– Kollin Carter
Obviously, I was having trouble trying to be super creative with my words for this haiku, and poetry is not my strong suit. However, I thought this was assignment was interesting, out of the ordinary, and I liked that.
This was my fun activity for the week. In order to create this, I used Snapchat! I like the idea of using different platforms to complete these assignments. It allows for diverse creativity and different means of expression.
The challenge of this assignment was to write a haiku summing up my favorite myth/legend/tale. Being the corgi-obsessed person that I am, I thought relatively quickly of the legend of Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards over the Underworld.
My creative thought-process considered an alternative to the legend. What if, perhaps, the “menacing,” “vicious” dog was instead a cute corgi? Why do so many legends/myths, such as that of Cerberus, have to be intimidating?
This is the original assignment. I chose this for a fun, new learning activity that does not include our 80s theme from the assignment bank. This writing assignment basically asked me to take my favorite fairytale and create a Haiku that will allow the reader to read it and guess what fairytale it is. This assignment was fun because I have not made a Haiku in a long time. I actually forgot what consisted of creating a Haiku, so I had to look it up and it is made up of three sentences with the first and last line having five syllables and the middle having seven syllables. If you have not figured out what my Haiku is revealing, it is the fairytale movie Shrek, describing Fiona. Fiona is a princess that is beautiful and loving, but comes night fall, she turns into an ogre just like Shrek. In Shrek’s eyes, Fiona was still a beautiful princess when she turned into an ogre. The way I worded my Haiku is the way Shrek views Fiona.
I used Canva to create this project. I decided to make the background a beautiful view of the rolling hills that look healthy with their green grass. I chose this background because the color green is what the ogre green looks like on Shrek and Fiona. Also, I chose this image to represent Fiona’s outer beauty and there are also strange things that happen within those hillsides at night just like Fiona when night fall comes. This project has to do with digital storytelling because I had to create and write my own Haiku and then publish it on the Internet. I used to things, writing and a platform to create the project. I found this assignment interesting because I had to come up with what to write and then had to finish it out by creating something to help establish and elaborate my Haiku. The background image I used helped my Haiku have a deeper meaning, it was not just a randomly selected image.
I chose the fairytale movie Shrek for my work because it is one of my all time favorite disney movies. I thought of some other fairytales but I saw this image of the rolling green hills and for some reason I pictured Shrek and Fiona running freely together over the hills. This image took me into the Shrek movie, not where Shrek lives, but when he and Fiona walk back from the castle after he saves her. The scenery around them is beautiful and this image reminded me of it. Overall, I had a fun time creating this assignment. It was defiantly more challenging than it sounded for me.
Legends, myth, and folklore: There thousands of tales and varieties that exist in the world, but sometimes it takes too long to share your favorite one. Take your favorite myth, legend, or folktale, or find a new one, and wrap it up into a haiku. You can either do the myth as a whole, or focus on your favorite interpretation or essence of it.
For this assignment, I chose to write a haiku about Medusa. The monster has been in many different movies and books I have read, so I thought it would be interesting to write a haiku about her and the myth.
One look and you’re stone Slithering snakes as her hair Slain by Perseus.#ds106
I tweeted the haiku because I thought it would look better as a tweet rather than written directly on the blog. I did do some quick research on Medusa to make the haiku accurate. All of the most important information about Medusa is included in the poem. It didn’t take too long to make the haiku (the assignment only has one star), but it was hard to come up with the best way to phrase the lines so that they had the appropriate amount of syllables.
For this 1 star assignment we were asked to pick our favorite myth, legend, or folktale, and wrap it up into a haiku.
There was a young girl
Who wore glass heals to a ball
Then married the prince
If you haven’t guessed, my Haiku is about Cinderella! I loved to watch Cinderella growing up on re-peat and till this day I love to watch the new versions of the story. This assignment was short but I also had fun trying to put little words into a larger story. It was like putting together a puzzle that was very unrestricted. When I finally decided which fairy tale I was going to use, I tried to do a Haiku from the start of the story to finish but that became really difficult. So I chose to start the Haiku about a young girl (I wanted to put lady but that was too many syllables), then I explained that she went to the ball and finally married the prince (that she met at the ball).
The first assignment I completed from the assignment bank was to write a haiku about a folklore, myth, or legend. I used this to relate back to our course theme, spies. In society, there is the legend that spies always hide their identity. For example, James Bond has the codename 007. Even government spies have to hide their identities, and not even their families are released to the real information of their work. I chose this assignment because I haven’t written a haiku since elementary school. I thought it would be a nostalgic thing, and bring me back to writing the simplest of poems. I honestly couldn’t even remember how to write one, so I had to google it. Then it was just the effort of me sitting at my desk, thinking of sentences, and counting out the syllables on my fingers. At first, I actually wrote a haiku about the myth of Pandora’s Box, and then I realized this would be a perfect opportunity to incorporate our theme. Then I tweeted them to be able to link them back in my weekly summary. It was quite an easy process, and I enjoyed it very much. Being an English major, I like to write as much as I can. This was a perfect way to do something interesting while also nostalgic.
Let me first start out with saying that I ADORE HAIKUS.
I LOVE THEM.
I used to work at a place called Phonathon, and I would make Haikus for all of the people that worked there, all the moods I had during work, and how hungry I was. I got a paper plate award saying that I was the Haiku Queen. Pretty legit, right?
I first learned about Haiku’s when I was a 3rd grader in Hawaii. We had a Japanese culture week, and making Haikus also helped with learning individual syllables and sounds. Ever since, I just loved making the darn things.
This Haiku is about my favorite Korean folktale. When it is sunny and raining at the same time, a tiger gets married. My mom is Korean, and she used to tell me this story all the time. We lived in Hawaii, and it’s always rainy and sunny at the same time, Hello, rainbows!!! In Korea, it was a rare occurrence in ancient times (LOL) so I guess the probability of that happening is the same probability of a tiger getting married. As a child, I cracked up every time she’d tell it.
I think I took this assignment a little farther than I was supposed to and I tried writing the Haiku in calligraphy. I HAVE NEVER DONE CALLIGRAPHY BEFORE. But, I’m getting married and I wanted to try my hand at it so we could save $$$ instead of hiring someone, haha. I watched this video, and I tried to copy the way she does down strokes and up strokes using a non-calligraphy pen, and it was pretty sh***y, but oh well. ALSO, I kept messing up so I had to start cutting and taping the good-letters together because I started to rack up the hours. Here is a picture of my mess of a little workspace:
But it didn’t turn out so bad! I mean, it looks like a kindergartener taped it together. and the lettering is SO BAD, you don’t have to tell me………But I tried! XD
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