Project 1 Reflection

In my project, I found that it was much easier to default to narrating as I would have before this class as opposed to actively making choices to put into practice the techniques we reviewed in class. Many of the concepts we talked about made sense in one way, but when it came down to putting them directly into my story it was very difficult. For example, I wanted to relate to the audience through as many senses as possible. One cool way I succeeded in doing that was by drawing the scenes as they came. I initially also tried to use descriptive language to help the story come alive, but found myself unsure of what really happened – what did it actually smell like, look like, feel like? Because I was telling another person’s story, I knew something of what she was feeling, but very little beyond that – so I was bound by how she told the story. I also found it hard to include very much beyond the plot itself, because 5 minutes was barely enough time to actually tell the story. Other than this, however, I was happy with the outcome of the story, and happy with how much it spoke for itself, in terms of plot and meaning.

Composing Summary

My narrative approach through my video, “The Officiant” was to be as descriptive as I could with setting in order to identify with the audience, and then to tell a funny story in order to convey a belief about people and being brave. I used the first minute of my narrative to set the stage for the rest of the story, by describing the main character and the setting she was in. I felt this was necessary in order to make familiar a setting that would otherwise be somewhat foreign to most viewers. I decided to make my narrative sound as natural as possible, even conversational, because it’s a casual story with some funny parts and an entertaining plot. To make it conversational, I added some of my own comments and let myself chuckle or pause when it felt right, just to show that I personally found the story amusing. When I was composing I didn’t have a clear thesis about the belief I was going to try to convey, but by the time I published it I knew that it was about Katie’s personality, and how she believed in stepping out of her comfort zone for the sake of other people and also for the sake of adventure and risk itself. Largely I let the story tell this on its own, and I hope that it was communicated, because I never say it outright. The genre I was going for was informal and fun, so that the audience felt drawn in by its light-heartedness and cheerfulness, and with the narrative itself I accomplished this by sticking to the plot but adding small anecdotes and descriptions of interesting personalities to create a certain culture of story within the viewers mind.

To accomplish this same goal with regards to genre and belief, the multimedia aspect of the story lent itself very well. Drawing simple pictures with a chalkboard automatically sets a precedent of childishness, which I think can have positive connotations with a certain level of freedom and lightness which compliments the theme of the story well. Most of the cartoons I chose to draw were of simple facial expressions, which was intentional to convey feelings of joy, anxiety, or simple happiness. Once again, these simple expressions helped to perpetuate a feeling of childishness and simplicity. The music I chose to play in the background I chose because it sounds funny to me; the catchy, repetitive bass-line coupled with the simple yet exotic sounding beat also contributed to the mood of the video, which I intended to be compelling and still fun.

With regard to how I accommodated to my expected audience, I did a couple things. I first expected that my audience knew the basis of the story – what a wedding was like, how the ceremony usually went, and what an officiant was. I also expected that this audience was somewhat in my age and demographic, to the extent that I used common conversational language and made no effort to change my narration from how I might say it to a friend. Knowing that it would be published to the Web, I got my main idea for the chalkboard from a general idea of videos I’ve seen, wherein the narrator uses drawings, animation, stop motion, or the like to convey ideas along with words, often in music videos. So to some extent, I think subconsciously I was imitating what I knew to be an acceptable form of web-video.

Exercise 1 – elements of story

In The Instigator, a woman uses a description of her experience as a freshman in college and how her father acted in order to convey how she understands and sees herself as inheriting much of who her father was.

Allegorize: the speaker uses a single story to paint a picture of another personality, in order to ultimately speak about herself. Her goal is to ultimately to explain why she likes to play pranks on other people, and why she likes to laugh at herself and other people: she starts her story with the statement, “I like to laugh”, but doesn’t return to this statement until the end, when she comes to conclusions by drawing parallels between her Dad and herself. She describes herself by describing someone else.

Perform: the speaker used descriptive language to put the audience “in her shoes”, and used images to recall emotions.  In one instance in the video, she describes how she felt embarrassed and was “freaking out”, and on the screen was an unrelated photo of her as a child with an excited “freaking out” expression on her face. Although it’s understood that the photo was not of the exact moment she was talking about, still the image helps to convey exactly what “freaking out” meant: slumping in a chair, jaw dropped, wide eyes, and perhaps feeling small – like a child. The image conveys much more than we might think at first, and in this way engages the audience on another sensory level in addition to the orally conveyed story.

Affect: more than anything else, this speaker likes to convey how she felt in the story, in order to bring the audience into the same state of mind. This is related to the pictures, but goes beyond the pictures as a whole. The narrator does much to set up the story to convey how uncomfortable she felt. By telling the story chronologically, events build on each other until the sense of discomfort is felt by the audience as well.

One belief that is conveyed throughout all of this is that the narrator believes that laughing is valuable, and often it is necessary to make people uncomfortable in order to lead to an abandon of self-consciousness that makes true laughter possible. The narrator used the example of breaking a social norm as a positive thing which led to light-heartedness. This all  points to a belief in the value of relationships and joy over social acceptance or normality.

Some takeaways I have from this story is that when composing a digital story, beliefs are often conveyed through specific action. If a person believes a certain thing, they will display it in their everyday lives; if a person values a specific thing, they will work to make it a part of their lives. Often a persons values are best understood by watching where they put their time. Thus, if I am going to try to tell a story about another person’s values or beliefs, rather than necessarily asking them what those beliefs and values are, starting with where they put their time will lead me to beliefs and values that I can describe through a story and which will ring true and feel authentic. I also learned that allegories can be simple, and symbols can be as basic as one person in a story representing how another person sees themselves – it doesn’t have to be how an object represents a concept which applies to a specific unspoken emotion in the deepest recesses of a character’s psyche (High School English classes would often beg to differ). Lastly I learned that conveying a strongly held belief is often essential to engaging an audience – we don’t want to listen to people with lukewarm, casual beliefs that aren’t lived out.