Our Story

When Group 2 met for the first time, we were so excited at the idea of creating a visual project that speaks to a multicultural experience, especially one that involves the common misunderstandings that can occur between two people from opposite ends of the world.

What we developed was a pilot for a potential ten part series that covers the experience of two young women, Young and Emily, who are brought together by their parents second marriage, only to be torn apart years later by divorce. This new change in their life leads them to recounting their fondest memories of being together, which includes pretending to be mermaids while swimming at their summer cottage. All is well until the drama between their parents eventually sparks a heated argument between the girls. Each sides with their respective parents, despite neither truly knowing what has occurred between them. The following day both girls begin to experience strange mermaid-like changes to their outward appearances. The pilot focuses specifically on Young who was moved back to South Korea after the split. Each subsequent episode of the series will focus on the sisters navigating through the new obstacles of their relationship in order to rid themselves of these scary outward changes. Each episode will be posted on Youtube and the viewers feedback will heavily influence the direction in which the story goes. Audience reaction is a central part of filmmaking, and yet there doesn’t seem to be a web series that responds to the plot requests of the viewers as it airs. Although we will only be creating one episode, the idea is that after we post the first episode on YouTube, we will gather user comments and take their suggestions for how users want the plot to continue, while simultaneously incorporating our key plot points so that the story still makes sense. We will add prompts at the end of the episode to help spawn these suggestions. Through this, we hope to engage with our audience on a deeper level. Since we have been in quarantine, we have all personally seen an influx of content creation made by regular people through platforms like TikTok and YouTube. We want to include the perspectives of our audience in order to create a product that feels unique, satisfying, and timely. In addition to including prompts in the YouTube videos themselves, we will also be posting our questions on our (soon to be created) Murk instagram stories, as well through a twitter poll. We will prepare a script for each direction, and will use whichever prompt gains the most support across our platforms. 

When we were developing our story concept, it was a challenge trying to find a story that spoke to all our different interests and talents, as well as working within our assignment guidelines. We wanted to create a narrative that would clearly demonstrate a cultural misunderstanding. We crafted the characters to fit different understandings of Korean and Canadian culture. Young is methodical, organized, and frustrated with how she perceives the situation between their parents, while Emily is casual, rushed, and quick to anger. Their misunderstanding is rooted in wanting to protect their parents, and in turn their own cultural backgrounds, from scrutiny. 

When we were storyboarding ideas, we initially decided on a zombie film that would be focused on how a pandemic was affecting different cities around the world, focusing specifically on Seoul and Toronto. However, there were creative disagreements amongst members in our group that lead to a complete upending of this idea. We had to readjust very quickly, and that is how Murk came into light.  

Murk was created for younger members of Generation Z, specifically 13 to 16 year olds. Our goal with this project was to set up a base for nine more episodes, which will all be uploaded to YouTube. We wanted to use South Korea and Canada as test markets. YouTube is an increasingly popular platform in both South Korea and Canada. In addition to this, foreign content has grown in popularity in both countries. 

In Korea: 

• Korean YouTube Channels grew by 50% between 2018 and 2019 with “over 2000 channels with 100K [subscribers] and more than 200 channels with 1M+ [subscribers] in Korea” (quote taken from Crichton of techcrunch.com) 

• Globalization has led to an increased desire for more foreign content in Korea

• The top 25 Korean music groups on YouTube “receive 90% of their views from outside the country” (quote taken from Crichton of techcrunch.com)

In Canada: 

• According to a study conducted by Vice Media, 78% of Gen Z in Canada say they use social media to discover cultural content -- 88% use YouTube for this discovery

• 76% of Canadian consumers use YouTube on a regular basis 

• In Canada, Berkowitz et al. of the Ryerson FCAD Audience Lab note that "YouTube attracts audiences with a number of unique value propositions including a high variety of distinctive, engaging content from around the world that is accessed freely, easily, and is always available.” (90) 

Our ideal viewer would thus be a person between the ages of 13 and 16 who wants to learn more about other cultures and customs, and who enjoys watching and/or creating video content. 

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We want to inspire young filmmakers around the world to work with the materials they have -- the future of creativity is guided by globalization and technology. When we think of rebuilding and reimagining creativity, we think of collaborating cross culturally using whatever resources that are available to us. There is so much creativity online, and so many free programs available to create amazing content on. You can do anything using free software like zoom, including create a narrative for a series. If you have a smartphone, you can make a movie. If you have friends in other countries, there's nothing stopping you from making something together anymore. All barriers have disappeared, and generation Z is shaping the future by making what they want and uploading when they want to. Despite never meeting, we managed to create a final product that we feel extremely proud of using the materials we had available to us - and that is what rebuilding is all about!