Final Project - Korey Klinger

Philosophy of Storytelling

Stories are told for many reasons. They are told to entertain, to teach lessons, to express emotions, or simply to spread information. A story is a documentation of some event, either real or fictional. The purpose of telling a story is to create an experience for the audience. The author might be trying to share one of their personal experiences with the audience, or they may be trying to make the audience experience a new fictional story.

Story telling is difficult to do accurately.  A story will have one meaning to the author, but the audience can find an entirely different meaning. The author will usually try to help the audience understand or relate to their story using descriptive language and emotion. Sometimes the story is told to intentionally leave the audience confused. When telling stories, I usually want my audience to get an accurate interpretation of the story and see exactly what I do. However, when I hear a story, I like to imagine my own version and I often dismiss some details if they conflict with my interpretation.

There’s a lot more to storytelling than just telling the story. Much thought is put in from the author on the arrangement of the story. Should it be told in chronological order? Is there a better way to tell the story? Will the audience be able to follow? When creating a video story, the author must make even more decisions. The author must decide whether to use literal or figurative visuals and how closely they need them to match the events of the story. Here the author also has the option to alter the telling of the story to better match the visuals, as long as it doesn’t conflict with the story’s purpose. The author could use whatever footage they can get, and try to make it fit in the story as best as they can.

Project Reflection

At the beginning of the semester, I wanted to do a creative project. I had a few ideas, but I couldn’t get very far with any of them before I ran out of ideas. I decided to scrap my fictional stories and go for a personal story. I had only been home for one or two weeks since the summer and I was starting to miss being home with my pets. I figured I could tell all kinds of stories about them, and that would make me feel better. I decided to write about how we got to keep Baby, our youngest African grey parrot. I finished the first draft of my story and presented it in class without much preparation. I wasn’t worried about presenting, but when it was my turn I was a little nervous and talked a bit quieter than I would have liked to. I was surprised that everyone said they liked my tone.

Recording the audio story was probably the hardest part of the project. It felt weird talking to an empty room, knowing that what I say will be played in class in front of everybody, possibly multiple times. I tried typing out what I wanted to say and recording myself reading it. That ended up sounding very monotone, and I never liked to say exactly what I wrote down. I then tried just writing a list of what I wanted to talk about, but I just ended up reading the list. I finally tried recording without looking at any script and I think it sounded much better. Although I had 10 minutes worth of pauses and retakes to cut out. For the revision I tried to speak a bit clearer and with more feeling, while being careful not to lose the relaxed tone.

For the first iteration of the video project, I filled about half of the timeline with found footage. Over the break, I recorded as much footage of the birds as I could. I tried to get footage to fill the empty parts of my story, but the birds wouldn’t always cooperate. Baby kept trying to bite me or the camera whenever I started recording. Because we sold the other babies, the only visuals I could get of them were in a photo album at home.  

I liked watching everyone else’s projects and hearing everyone’s different suggestions. I always like coming up with suggestions for things and I liked seeing my ideas show up in the next presentations. I got positive feedback so I was afraid to make any­­ drastic changes. I keep changing my mind on whether or not I need to change things. I think it works for the most part. I’ve only made some minor changes, but I think it’s finished.