Philosophy of Storytelling:
Stories are told for many reasons: to entertain, to
persuade, and or to make a point. As an
audience, I think you must understand why you are hearing a story in order to
dwindle down its message to determine its truth. Lies and exaggeration, combination and
omission: all of these are tools used by some extent by a storyteller. Are they okay to use? While I think the obvious answer would be
“no”, I think that using these tools has become commonplace for those who tell
stories, whether they like it or not. Adding
visuals can add layers to a story as well, but perhaps not to the same
conclusion a reader would come to naturally.
By
adding visuals, I think we “plant a seed” of how a reader should interpret the
story’s message. This can be used to
reinforce a truthful story, to “ground” a fictionalized one, or to distract the
reader from a false story. The way in
which we use these graphics also can change how a reader perceives the
message. My previous example of a story
about a crazy subway encounter on the way to work recanted among colleagues:
this could very easily be exaggerated by dramatic music, low camera angles, and
quick-cut-together scenes. On the other
hand, sad music can tell an audience they should feel sad, or suspenseful music
to create a sense of fear.
These literary and visual “tools”
are used to create connections amongst audiences and to express emotion and creativity,
but I think so many times they are abused and replaced by over-the-top versions
of themselves in order to provoke a certain feeling. Whether these effects change the main plot of
the storyline or just adds to unnecessary components of the story, surely this
varies on the storyteller and why the story is being told. Understanding that
these effects are being used to slant a story can allow an audience to
understand the underlying, true story being told.
An example of effects which alter
the perception of a story is when we watched the opening credits of a scary
movie, but with happy 90’s rock music in the background instead of the original
audio. The credits contained lots of aerial
footage of deserted nature scenes. When
asked what type of movie we thought this was an intro to, almost the entire
class said romantic comedy. When the
90’s music was muted and the original music was played, we quickly realized
this was rather the opening credits to a horror movie.
Process Reflection:
Although I had previously considered myself
well-experienced with computers and many computer programs, this course has
taught me a lot pertaining to audio and visual content. Throughout the duration of the course and the
final project, my audio story remained largely unchanged. I enjoy the story I told and the comparisons
that I made in the first half of my project.
The second half, I was more hesitant to tell at first. I describe how I feel in cities and attempt
to uncover why I feel out of place outside of them. I was worried how this portion of my project
would translate to audiences, because if they don’t share my same viewpoint I
don’t know that they would be interested in what I have to say. All and all, I thought this second part was fun to
write, and after adding visuals and a phone-call recording to transition into
this reflection portion, I am very happy with how it turned out.
From
the start I had always envisioned my project with lots of short clips that highlighted
all of the wonderful cities I was describing.
This proved to be a very time intensive process (I was under the
impression that all final projects had to be around four minutes), but once
again I am happy with how it turned out.
The timing of the video clips with my audio story was something I wanted
to get right, and ended up being a significant portion of my editing. I worked
a lot with the speed of the videos, either speeding them up or slowing them
down, and cropping them so they matched the fast pace of my voice.
One
of the things I struggled with was the decision to include background music in
my project. One of my earlier drafts of
the projects included a karaoke version of Frank Sinatra’s “New York”, and I
love what it added to my piece. It was recognizable,
not distracting, about a city, and perfect for the background of a portion of
my project. I struggled after this,
however. I thought the contrast
between having music in portions and just my voice in others was too strong, so
ultimately I filled the rest of my project with background music as well. There was extensive editing to make sure that
this distracted as little as possible by my final version. I do really like the songs I chose, and think
they are very appropriate for this project, but sometimes wonder if I made the
right decision to include them.
Overall,
although I enjoyed learning Audacity and Premiere, my favorite part of this
course was reading the two assigned books.
I come from a science background and often struggle with classes that
highlight creativity and open-ended discussions (for lack of a hard right and
wrong). I don’t read as often as I
should either, but I really enjoyed reading both Invisible Cities and
Bluets and the class discussions about them. They featured different writing
styles than what I was used to and really opened my eyes towards both this
class, the projects, and other literature in general.
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