Project B Rationale

The Adventures of Gub the Penguin

I chose to do a Geo-Narrative for Project B. This was because I am a creative person and would much prefer to tell a story than to display information. I encountered a problem early in that I had recently lost my camera and so was unable to use my own images in the way that i had planned. I overcame this problem by using a variety of public domain and copyleft/ share and share alike images that I found on the internet, and photoshopping them heavily. It basically involved two sets of images; the characters (namely a variety of Emperor Penguins as Gub, John Howard as Tulio and Daniel Craig as Dick the Head).

I chose John Howard and Daniel Craig as the faces for my human characters because they are heavily photographed people and a lot of the images of them available are in the public domain.

For the story itself I wanted something funny and bizarre; the sort of thing Monty Python would do. And I felt it was important that I have several characters on several separate journeys that ran parallel to each other. In addition to this I wanted there to be a surprise at the end, so I introduced the John Howard character as a Master of Disguise. This allowed me to have some fun and introduce the “Where is Tuilo...” aspect. The humour therein lies, of course, in the fact that it is very obvious where Tulio is. This also allowed me to have the surprise ending with the final image of Gub being Tulio in disguise.

I had initially intended to use the lines in Google Maps to show every place the characters travelled, but this proved too difficult and I was running out of time. Not to mention that there are no commercial airlines that do flights to antarctica; or at least none that have a frequent flyer program. So I limited the use of the line tool to Gub’s return to antarctica, and I numbered the markers so that the narrative still had an easy to understand chronology.

The networked aspect of my project lies most heavily in the fact that the images used were posted on flickr and embedded on google maps. Two seperate websites combined to make something new. The project could not exist without either. In addition to this there are many links to various websites for additional information on the content of the websites. Some with genuine information, and some that were simply there for the humour factor.