The Routes of the Teen Titans
One of the main reasons that we wanted to study character routes is that you can analyze a lot about a character through their movements. At first, I tried to find a way to contrive the analysis of their actions on a map. For instance, there's an entire act that Starfire doesn't say any words even though she's fighting alongside the Titans. How do you show she wasn't talking, or how do you explain their lack of movement while the rest of them are moving? It became a problem that we had. As you can see in this video, it's a very simplistic view of their movements. While Fiona did give us some ideas of what we could do to fix it, I didn't get a chance to make it work due to leaving it to the last minute. The video shows moments where certain Titans are in one place while another is in another place. One good idea was the usage of timestamps. With the way we implemented timestamps, you can still get a sense of what the video is showing due to some dots showing up in different places at the same time.
The dots represent the Titans, each dot associated with the color associated with each Titan. The dot is coded using the action tag that has the attributes mrkr, with, move, and place. The place is the location with coordinates. The mrkr color codes them to their color. I found out later that with and move aren't helpful.
Mapping Decisions:
Though Teen Titans takes place in the fictional Jump City, many of the locations in the show were based on the city of San Francisco. When mapping, our team had to find coordinates in San Francisco that were in some way relevant to the story. Below, we've listed some of those locations and the choices we made when mapping.
Slade's Lair
Obviously, there are no secret evil lairs in San Francisco (Well...none that our team is aware of...), so for Slade's lair, Shannon found a bar called The Hideout and used those coordinates. This is one of the best examples of a time where we, lacking enough context for the exact location of a place, used a location that was named after something that was a reference to the story.
Amusement Park
In episode 10, Beast Boy and Terra go to an amusement park in Jump City late at night and ride roller coasters. This location was one of the trickier ones to find coordinates for in San Francisco. There aren't any major amusement parks in the actual city, and the ones that came close didn't have roller coasters. Because Beast Boy and Terra are shown riding a roller coaster, Amber wanted to find one that had one. The closest actual amusement park was a Six Flags, slightly outside of San Francisco in Vallejo, California. We figured this would be an applicable location because the descriptions in the episode's transcript made it seem that they weren't as close to Titans Tower as the Titans usually are, so it would be reasonable to assume they were somewhat outside of the city limits.
Ben's Diner
Terra and Beast Boy, before riding roller coasters, eat at a late-night diner called 'Ben's Diner'. Just like Slade's Lair, there is no actual Ben's Diner in San Francisco. To substitute, Amber found a 24-hour diner called 'Orphan Andy's' in San Francisco. It was close enough to the rest of the locations, was one of the only ones open late at night, and described itself as serving burgers, which is close to what was described in the episode.
Museum
In episode 1, the main location is a museum. In order to find a location, Lauren first looked for museums in San Francisco. Initially, she eliminated the museums based on their subjects, and then came on a final decison by eliminating them by exhibits. The museum Lauren ended up going with had a time/clock exhibit which is similar to the villain of the episode, Warp.
Cage for BeastBoy vs Wildebeest
Similar to the Platform, Lauren wasn't expected on finding an actual cage for the location, but out of curiosity, she still looked it up. What showed up was a batting cage center, and she thought it worked for the location. The real location name is Batters Box SF, another reason to pick it being box is similar to cage.
Football Stadium & Underground Locker Room
There were a couple of stadiums to choose from around the city, but Shannon wanted to find one that would be big enough to give the sense of abandonment Cyborg felt, as well as have a sizeable space underneath for the portion of the episode in the locker room. Kezar Stadium seemed to be a good pick for this.
Underground Mine, Worm Tunnels, and Big Tunnel
What's with all the tunnels in these episodes? The Titans seem to spend a good portion of their time underground. The tunnels pass through the area deemed Stockton Street tunnel in San Fransisco, and are also strategically about 3 miles away from The Hideout, where Slade's Lair is. The tunnels are a not as close to the Titans Tower, but this is because the rate at which the worms were moving, Shannon figured that it would take about the same amount of time for the worms to get that distance with Starfire, Raven, and Beast Boy following them as it would take Robin, Raven, and Terra to get to Slade's Lair on foot.
