Known for their intelligence and underhanded cleverness, ravens are the subject of mysterious or scary texts. They evoke a sense of darkness. For our project, we will try to explore why they are perceived as such and how people’s view on ravens have changed throughout history.
Our project will focus on their symbology/history and we will use various mediums to show our research. A slideshow will be our primary medium. The photos will mainly consist of drawings crafted by local artists that we know personally. As a request, the pictures will be in black and white to follow the mysterious theme of ravens. Furthermore, we will work on a narration to play in the background of the slideshow. This narration will be a creative story but also influenced by a Native American story called Flying Wonder. To add more dimension, we will be writing our story with our own research in mind, much like the previous class project of taking a collective story and shaping it how we like.
Needing inspiration, we scoured the Web for stories about ravens. This is how stumbled upon Flying Wonder. We figured that a creative story will be told best in museum setting by using a slideshow. Doing so will help us evoke the dark tone of our theme. More importantly, using locally made art will complement the museum, where some paintings are made by Alaskan artists. Unfortunately, using a slideshow will be rather tedious because we must make sure that the tone is exactly how we want it. The narration will be a lot of work; compiling all the audio, art and research will prove to be tricky but if done well, it could be a success.
Having worked on the creative portion of the project, we know that we also need an academic component. We decided to individually work on a specific topic about ravens that we found interesting. Each of us has a responsibility of selecting a medium and relaying our research that way. Certainly, we will face the issue of trying to make all the mediums look cohesive in the Layar app. We have to make each of our mediums related but different enough that they’re not redundant. If it all works out, however, our whole project should be a great mix of group and individual work. Since our personalities are different, we should be able to create different mediums that would cater to a general audience.
Collective Stories 
Using a narrative powerpoint sounds like a wonderful idea, especially with black and white art and a voiced story as your focus. To make it more enveloping to watch, maybe consider having different sounds and things going off in the background that goes along with the narrative, like wings flapping or ravens cawing. If your story has actual people talking in it, or personified ravens, consider having different members of the group narrate spoken dialog, that way it feels like a group project and a combined effort, much like a lot of Alaskan storytelling is. Overall, I think this is a wonderful idea and can’t wait to see it realized.
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I think it’s great how many different methods of presenting the information you guys are using. I think it’ll be a really strong balance of entertaining media and academic research. It is also very relevant to not just the museum but also to the topic of this class, its really smart that it has strong ties to Alaska and folklore throughout many other cultures. I’m really interested in hearing some background and cultural views on the raven. The recording of the story you all did turned out great, it adds a lot to your project.
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I really like the variety that will be presented with this project and I think your audience will like it as well. The variety may also attract a lot more people that maybe you are trying to reach. Ravens have kind of a mixed impression that they leave on people for example, some people have heard that they are so smart and express many different sounds as a language and others just see them as birds that eat garbage. So this might be able to swing peoples opinions on ravens and spark some interest to learn more about them for themselves. This was a good topic and I can’t wait to see it!
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I think its great in your project in how you approached the topic of Ravens. To me, there was no clear bias in your views of Ravens, obviously separate people tackled the topics on whether Ravens are inherently good or evil, but the importance is that the separate views were balanced. I personally enjoyed the views of Ravens in literature and how deeply ingrained they are in our culture they are. The position on Good Ravens was particularly good because of the amount of cultures presented and their views on Ravens in culture, I thought it was a good presentation of a topic we generally don’t think about, as culturally we view Ravens as omens of death and misfortune. So kudos to you and your group!
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