The fourth image

As the stories I received from my three images were very weird and wonderful it was quite hard to choose a fourth image to try and get everyone to come up with the same story. In quite a lot of the stories the rabbit ends up dying so I had thought about a gravestone as my fourth image however I predicted that this would probably take people off in a whole other direction so I chose one of the simple outcomes as my target stories.
TARGET STORY:
A man had a whole fridge full of Rockstar so he decided to take a few cans in his bag whilst he went on a mission to take pictures of rabbits in the forest. The only rabbit that he found to take a picture of was sitting next to a large wooden tree house.
Female, 32, Secretary

I added this image to my three images to try and get everyone to write a similar story to the one above.

I asked a new group of people as the first group of people would probably try and fit this image in to there old story instead of creating a new simpler one.

Here are the second round of stories:

A young photography student had to take pictures of the forest for his project but he had a hangover and couldn't muster up the energy to do so. To cure this problem he drank a big can of Rockstar and then proceeded to the woods. Whilst there he found an interesting tree house to take a picture of and a lovely wild rabbit that sat posing for 2 minutes.
Female, 20, Law Student

Stuart had been sitting for an hour now in his magnificent wooden house in the woods and still he was as bored as when he set out on his quest for an adventure. He decided it was time he had something to eat and drink. He was sipping away at his can of Diet Rockstar energy drink when a rabbit appeared in the woodland down below so he got out his camera phone and took a picture. Now he at least had something to show for his day.
Male, 19, Waiter

There was a young boy who was fascinated with rabbits. He was walking home from school one day and saw a nice grey rabbit. He decided to follow the rabbit for a while. The rabbit took him to a destination that was better than he could have ever dreamed of. It was a massive wooden tree house in the forest. He climbed in to the tree house and came across a can of Rockstar (his favourite drink!). The young boy drank the Rockstar and climbed down from the tree house. He then took a picture of it to remind him of his great time.
Female, 23, Bar maid

Diet Rockstar was the new craze in drinks so Nigel got himself down to the supermarket to get some before going on a walk to the woods. He was going to the woods to carry on building his giant tree house so he decided that the energy drink would be perfect for providing him with enough strength to get on with the building. Unfortunately when he was walking down the woodland path he tripped over a rabbit and fell flat on his face breaking his camera phone in the process. He was upset and angry because he loved taking pictures on his phone so he gave up his hope of carrying on his tree house and went home to sulk.
Male, 40, shop assistant

As you can see none of the second round of stories were exactly the same as my target story how there were many similarities. The stories were all a lot shorter and less external objects were included. I think this is because there were more things to focus on and write about so they did not feel the need to make it more interesting, they were to busy focusing on how to bring all 4 images together. The fourth image did make everyone include a man in their story and quite a few of them did say that the man took a photo of either the rabbit or the tree house which is identical to my target story. One of the stories also mentioned the man going a walk to the woods which is identical and they all seemed to have the man on some sort of adventure or quest to do something so this is very similar to the target story. I was happy with the results because even though they weren't perfect the addition of the fourth image created very similar stories to the target story.

I continued my experiment by returning to my 3 original images and this time instead of adding a fourth image I added some text. I added the words: "for rabbits" to my image of Diet Rockstar and chose this story as my target story:

Once upon a time a rabbit buzzing off the effects of the highly caffeinated drink Rockstar built a tree house in 20 minutes.
Male, 46, Engineer

The results were perfect, they all included the rabbit feeling highly energetic as result of drinking Rockstar and either had the rabbit building a giant tree house or climbing a giant tree house. I found it quite remarkable that everyone came up with the same story but the words I added hadn't really left much scope for differentiation.
This shows that with the right images and words you can definitely get people to think in a certain way. This relates to Graphic Design a lot because the discipline is all about communicating a message. I feel that it is easy to get a message across but the important factor is experimentation with layout of different images and words so you can arrive at the perfect way of getting your message seen and interpreted perfectly.