Team Supernova’s Cabinet of Curiosities presentation (Evaluation)

Today my group comprised of Ade Shittu, Christopher Williams, David Sanni, Karan Dedhia and Reynold Maunze and I was meant to present our Cabinet of Curiosities project to Clifton Stewart and Matthew Hawkins. I was two minutes late to the presentation, we were scheduled to start at 10:15am but we started at approximately 10:20am. Unfortunately, Reynold Maunze didn’t attend to present our project with us.

The presentation was well put together we started by giving detailed descriptions of the main character, Marcus Hu Tang and then moving onto his immediate family, his brother, dad and mum. Next, we described the character of Tunde Belo, the main suspect of the missing person investigation of Marcus Hu Tang who went missing shortly after the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics. We then discussed the process of creating the materials we produced to make the missing person report realistic and believable. I think that this worked well; it showed we actually thought about different aspects of what really happens when a person goes missing. We produced a news report and a police interview of Tunde Belo. The news report is what really authenticates the missing person aspect of the project. Then we explained how our research informed our project. I played Matthew and Clifton the interview I conducted with Ade Shittu about the London 2012 Olympics. I think that we could of researched a bit more by collecting more information from different sources of information such as books or websites, but our forms of research were different and satisfactory.

Overall, I think the information included in the project was of a good quality, we covered all aspects of the project, our character’s profile was developed and with the addition of Marcus Hu Tang’s Tumblr blog and the constant updating of it too made him come to life even more. Pictures from the Olympics were added just before he went missing to symbolize he was there.  However, my group members and I do feel we could of presented it better to make the actual presentation ‘flow’ better.

Cabinet of Curiosities powerpoint presentation

Process/Development

Cabinet of Curiosities

At the first my group and I didn’t know what to do. Create a character? That’s nonsense, which should be easy, right? So we jumped straight into it we selected our characters ethnicity, which is Oriental Asian as he is from China. We chose this ethnic group because we didn’t go for the obvious choices of ethnicity and our character being from China opens up a lot of doors for us such us:

• It gives us the option to make him go missing in any country in the world.
• Why is in that country in the first place?
• The politics in China, such their emigration and immigration laws.
• How others around him treat him because of where he is from.

Then we decided a name for our character, we wanted to give him a stereotypical name so when a person hears the name they will think straight away “He is Chinese”. His name is “Marcus Hu Tang”; he also has a nickname, “Marcus Power” due to his infatuation with Technology. Marcus is a 21 year-old student aspiring to be an architect.

Marcus Tang is 5″8″, he is of a slim build, has short black hair, his eyes are brown, he likes to keep fit by regularly visiting the gym and his dress sense is casual/smart. Marcus Tang is the son of Jintao Hu Tang and Yongqing Hu Tang. His father Jintao Hu Tang is the President of China and is apart of the Communist Party of China. We then discussed how Marcus should go missing, what is actually realistic and what is believable. Our first idea was that Marcus was an exchange student from China, he is transferred to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States and studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, representing his love for technology. Two ideas stemmed from this background:

• He travels to the UK to meet a girl he met online and goes missing on the way there
• He is kidnapped by a organised crime gang who want security codes to his security software which protects banks in China and USA.

The third and final idea is the one we are using, Marcus goes to London, England to see the London 2012 Olympics & Paralympics. “Tunde Belo”, an official London 2012 steward, then kidnaps Marcus. Tunde Belo is a Black British male whose parents are from Nigeria, he is 21 years of age. Tunde Belo the motivation to kidnapp Marcus after recognising him from the T.V. The kidnapping takes place after the closing ceremony of the Olympics.

After we discussed the narrative of Marcus Tang and how he goes missing we discussed the materials needed to add to the project. I made a screenplay for an interview, we then produced the interview where Tunde Belo (Ade Shittu) is interviewed by DC Banks (David Sanni) and we found an actor to play Marcus so we took pictures and used Adobe Photoshop CS6 to put him at the Olympic stadium. We also made voice recordings of Marcus and a missing person news report; we planned to present the project as a news report.