My plan for my final project for the ALC Gala is to create a small tourism site of a fictional location that is used to share a gothic horror anthology via some world building, one of my short stories, and the typing and rambling of the website’s editor… and an entity.

 

To help convey the idea that this is an early website and to compensate for my limited experience with website building, I am designing it as a “work in progress”. I am focusing on the words, the hidden meanings and unfolding madness of the editor whose experience working on it and reading between the lines makes them slowly become unhinged. I will focus on my writing and using simple techniques to add visual appeal for the website; for example, I will include an amount of varied location bios and history for the setting, which will be added upon through the editor’s voice as small paragraphs placed accordingly throughout the site. All of their notes will be explained at the homepage as a last resort for communicating with the website team, who have made seemingly little progress and refuse to contact them through other means.

 

I originally planned to incorporate two short stories to show the experiences of multiple people who live in the town and their experiences via a “Tell Us Your Story” page, which would be uninterrupted narratives. This is not the same as the world building aspect; that will be down on its own page with descriptions of varied locations from the voice of the editor’s unspecified writing team. The editor would start interrupting the paragraphs with their own notes and eventually rants, showcasing stress and diminishing sanity.

 

I originally planned on having more short stories, but I stuck with one in the end since I want the readers to focus more on the editor’s narrative as a link between the events and locales as a resident of the town. This way I can still keep the idea of my anthology alive without overwhelming the readers.

 

This idea is the result of an aesthetic that plays into gothic horror by leaving the readers to picture the locations and piece together the story with hidden messages. Also this is something that is designed as a representation of the UNFOLD theme from a sinister angle, showcasing the unravelling of a person’s mind through unknown events that the editor will describe in the tourism page, as it is also a representation of the stress of lockdown and the constant anxiety born from over a year trapped by an virus, which like gothic horror, is the fear of something we cannot see and many clearly still do not understand.