talkin’ bout my generation ~
The first (250-500 words in length), should focus on the medium, on the experience of working in/with/across digital video and how that experience relates to traditional writing.
Dealing with video for me has always been quite interesting, mostly because it’s a form that I’m more likely to shy away from than not. The immense precision one needs to get exactly the cut they want doesn’t quite rub well with me, especially when compared to the relatively easy process of picking the right selection of words. In video, I’ve noticed the actual technical compiling of the video is always about a hundred times more difficult than conceiving or storyboarding it out. Actually getting your idea is, in my opinion, the easier half of the battle, and that seems kind of crappy to me. You know what you want and you know how to do it; the actual act of putting things together is an entirely different story and can take hours.
There’s also a high level of technological proficiency involved, which, while this doesn’t particularly bother me, I notice that writing is a fairly low-tech habit, when it comes down to it. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Video production for the masses however, has not been around fifty years, really. I think it’s awesome we’re using two technologies that are so distant in years to do the same thing.
Another thing I notice about remix video is you’re presented with a relatively limited pool of things to write about. You have to make your message suit the material given to you, and if you don’t exactly have the clip you’re for, then that means you have to make due and figure out what to do instead. This definitely gave me a lot of trouble; it was a struggle to figure out how to connect everything that made sense in my head, through the video. This isn’t like writing at all where you can just describe something forever. It’s like using magnetic poetry.
The second (250-500 words in length), should focus on the message, on the attempted rhetorical moves, on the editing techniques themselves and why various edits, cuts, mashups, etc. were done (what was their intended effect). This discussion should be grounded in the readings on semiotics, and constructions of gender, sexuality, and race.
I wanted to prove how the world has changed, especially in comparison to how men treat their women and their families. However, my first attempt didn’t work quite right: it was too linear and too narrative, mostly because I have a thing for linear narratives. However, going back and placing each circumstance back to back, I think, worked really well.
To get my point across, I made heavy use of juxtaposition, trying to compare the way people treat their families (“that’s fine” vs. “that hurt”) and how people treat their wive (hugging v. shoving out of car. I also, in a few cases, used the repeat effect to emphasize a certain point, such as the hurry on the elevator vs. the calm on setting the table, or the teamwork of the old family vs. the singular work of the man from the dodge charger commercial.
however, some of the comparisons I felt were a stretch, so I mixed and matched audio to force the audience to see them similarly. That way, the audio was the same, but the image was very different, and this made the comparison more obvious. I used this technique for the ice skating vs. party, and the couple smooching vs the man picking a car. I felt that this really helped.
Music was a difficult point for me. I wanted to find something that was sort-of neutral, but at the same time that highlighted my point. I didn’t want to make things impossible to hear over the music (which I think was a problem with some of the other videos), so I had to turn it down to the music to where it was almost impossible to hear. This was different from the opening and the closing: that I felt was very clear and started those comparisons off on a good foot: old fashioned background with Coronet music vs. industrial background with Nine Inch Nails.
Generally, I’m pleased with this.
