The process of creating a visual essay is daunting, especially for the beginner. When first presented with the task in my visual research methods course, I found it more than a little daunting. The freedom to create, and critique on endless subjects, within a visual format seems very liberating. Conversely, such freedom is also trying when commenting via a new and unfamiliar medium. Perhaps the most difficult task in this transition from paper to video is knowing where to begin. More specifically, one a might ask, what is expected of an essay that is predominantly visual?
The answer to this question is the most refreshing aspect of the transition from the written to the visual. The visual essay, still in an embryonic stage of use and development in the academic community, is a medium as of yet lacking definitive structure and rigid routine. Whereas the visual essay is moldable, the current expectations of the traditional academic essay are quite established and unyielding. The visual essay has more of an ability to truly express the writers voice because of this freedom to build.
Producing a visual essay was, for me, one of the most engaging and plain fun excursions in my academic career to date. The fact that one has ample room to play with form, voice, reference, and style turns out to be freeing rather than confusing.
It is easier to truly engage the viewer/receiver in a visual format. With tools like sound, framing, and narration emotion is easier to capture. The visual medium makes for heightened suspense, anger, sadness, what-have you, as more of the senses are brought in to play. One does not simply read or look. One must listen as well.
Personally, one of the biggest obstacles I encountered in producing my visual essay was my own technical ability. Although I knew that it was not necessary for the project to be professional level material, my desire to do my best work required me to make my best attempt at editing a short film. I spent countless hours compiling clips and music form the internet and elsewhere and was then faced with the task of creating some semblance of academic form. It was frustrating at first, even a program as simple as iMovie can be challenging when it has never been used. After a few hours of working with the program, however, I was able to mix, mash, and create with much more ease.
Showing the film to the public was another interesting and slightly scary aspect of this project. Most usually, a professor and the student author are the only ones to read a class paper. Part of the idea of the video essay, for me at least, is that it is more accessible, a more operable medium for the public. Thus it was very important to put my work onto the youtube and here on my blog! I hope that my readers enjoy the film, and I welcome any and all comments.
I agree that emotion/feeling was your most powerful devise in this piece. However, watching your classmates’ responses left me to believe that the intellectual and political argument being made was perhaps too obscured by your commitment to making your point formally. Which is to say that your complex analysis was sometimes overrode by the inherent and internal strength of the found materials you used, each bearing their own histories of feelings and emotions. Thus, your use of Eisensteinian montage was evocative and powerful but perhaps you needed to be more didactic in the end to secure an idea over a feeling.
ReplyDeleteThe project of calling upon the lineage of the protests and peace movements of the 60s via music and then pointing to the "recycling" of the sounds and quotes from that time period for a dramatically different (an extremely more conservative) purpose was unexpected. I was surprised to see how easily the rhetoric could be molded to fit the needs of two very different political parties.
ReplyDeleteSam, I really liked this film because of its "proof" that music has great power in evoking emotion, nostalgia, and ideology.
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