Philosophy
I suspect that there are two major
reasons as to why we tell stories the way we do: to entertain and to convey a
message to the reader. Everybody loves a good story. We tell stories to seduce
the audience, to enrich their lives. Storytellers paint pictures of far off
lands, a damsel in distress, or a great battle. If you have ever been reading a
book and could not put it down due to the anticipation of what may come on the
next page, you know the feeling of being fully immersed in a story. The goal of
a story is to deliver not only a literal sense of wonder, awe, and enjoyment,
but also to leave your reader wanting more. I cannot imagine that there is a
story that exists that does not try to convey some kind of message and I have
always found that the most entertaining and captivating stories are the ones
whose message is not spoon fed to me, but ones that allow for interpretation.
With the addition of visuals to
story, the storyteller gives the audience direct visual queues. We, the
storyteller, can create a connection with the audience, whether it’s something
comedic, suspenseful, or gut wrenching, with the simple use of an image or
video that corresponds with the words we are saying. It adds an extra element
that a simply vocalizing or reading the words from a page cannot match.
The making of a video story
involves a much more complex thinking process. Everything in this story is
meditated so the precision of images and videos is crucial. Things need to fall
at exactly the right place in order to evoke certain feelings. The ability to
use imagery to capture an atmosphere adds an extra dimension to storytelling.
Stories play with our emotions and
senses, and outside of books, they tend to deal with our auditory and visual
senses. The tools we use to attract ourselves and the audience to our story
stem from how compelling and relatable we make it, and that entails the use of entertaining,
whatever that may be, audio and visual cues.
Reflection
My first draft of this project was
rough in every sense of the word. It dealt with my nail-biting problem and
quickly found out that I am not very good at writing about personal topics. Every
time I recorded and re-recorded my audio, I felt more uncomfortable with it
(probably because it just wasn’t very good). So I scrapped it and decided to
talk about something a little more light-hearted, music. While some of my project touches on some
personal experiences of mine, it’s mostly my opinions on the current state of
jazz music.
I consider myself to be a fairly
tech-savvy person and when I found out we would be working primarily with
programs I was not familiar with (i.e. Audacity, Photoshop, Premiere), I
thought it would be an awesome learning experience and something I would have
no trouble catching onto. I was very wrong. Particularly with Premiere, the
learning curve was very steep for me, something I had never encountered in the
software realm. After a while, I developed a “ritual” for getting photos and
videos, lining them up properly, and checking to make sure everything sounded
and looked correct.
Acquiring pictures and videos was
easy. As you can imagine, there are countless YouTube videos of people playing
music. I attempted to record some live music of a band that was performing at a
bar, but the video turned out to be fairly useless due to my lackluster
cinematography. After composing this project, I have come to learn that timing
can be one of the most crucial aspects of storytelling. My project involves not
only the “right” images and videos, but also conveying them at the right time.
This applies both literally (lining up audio and video) and figuratively
(saying something at the right time). The work that I did in Premiere was very
simple. My project does not have any cool or crazy effects, like the ones that
were presented as tutorials in class. I wanted my project to be similar to the
John Baldessari video we watched. Like his video, mine contains videos and
images popping in and out while corresponding to my voice and the music in the
background.
Overall, I had a great time in
this class and working on this project. I can really see how my project
developed over time, considering the many things we covered, going all the way
back to the Terrence Hayes audio clips. Prior to this class, I had never
created or worked on a project like this. It was very refreshing to be creative
and voice something that was important to me. In the future, I hope to do more
work with Premiere and Photoshop and learn new things about the programs and
find fun and interactive things to do with them.
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