To delve deeper into issues of what makes a narrative — and how that story can be received by an audience with different levels of knowledge about the root material — I chose the following video of the first day of this past weekend’s InfoCamp, made by the I School’s Paul Goodman.

At first glance, this short video doesn’t appear to have a lot in common with my class project. (What does the first day of a conference have to do with how people watch television?) But while their content and subject matter are quite different, the InfoCamp video and my project must address, or attempt to address, issues of narrativity and “trueness” and be constructed in a way that accounts for the levels of meaning that different members of the audience may bring to the story. I have struggled with how to make sure the interviews I’m doing end up used in a fashion that feels fair to my interviewees; in that way, watching a video in which I appear was an interesting exercise in seeing whether the depiction felt fair to me.

For the sake of this post, I want to discuss whether this video is a narrative. But my viewing and writing are absolutely informed by (and tinged with bits of) Sturken and Cartwright’s writing on “the myth of photographic truth” and our class discussions of such issues. In essence, this video is a surveillance video — recording events as they happened, no words, just movement — framed in a particular way to show a particular slice of the event. And yet for all its surveillance conventions, it’s not objective. It’s altered, sped up and set to music, cut together in a particular way to evoke a particular feeling. I recognize this event (see also: Barthes), but it’s not the event as I experienced it.

So: Is it a narrative? It absolutely has temporal events, and many of them, as per Steiner’s definition; the video shows the passing of time. (I know that, because I was there, but I believe even a viewer coming to this video fresh would see discrete events and even gain some sense of their time order: a room begins to fill up with people; an empty board has papers tacked to it by the end; people leave one building and enter another.) Characters appear, disappear, and reappear as they move throughout the building; the first time I saw the video, I was struck by how many times one person in particular seemed to go up and down the stairs. The repeated characters help to keep the viewer anchored in the narrative: “Oh, there’s that girl with the headband again!”

But could the events in this video really be “double ordered”? The video itself is sequential; the events it depicts are also sequential — again, something that I know from being there, but something that the structure of the video strives to make clear as well. Could a viewer zoom to a particular part of the video and tell a story from just that? Re-order the footage and tell it backwards? I’m not sure. What I do know, though, is that even if the temporal ordering stayed the same, the retelling of the story would almost certainly be different for different viewers. People who were there might look for themselves and remember what they were doing in the moments the video caught them; I certainly do. People who weren’t there might make up their own stories about what’s happening, because aside from a few text titles sprinkled throughout, there’s nothing in particular to explain the events.

This video also seems to gel with Ryan’s definition of narrative. A setting? Yes; we see the event’s world — or, more accurately, worlds — clearly. (Back to Steiner for a second: the buildings almost become their own characters in this story, as we start at one, leave for another, and return to the first.) Characters? Yes, those repeating figures who dart in and out of the frame. Actions and happenings? Yes: people drink coffee, bound up and down the stairs, pin papers on boards, greet each other. Changes in the narrative world? I believe so; the main room shown at the start of the video looks and feels different at the end than it does at the beginning, and we see conversations start and stop — little changes in those people’s worlds, even if we can’t hear or understand them.

And yet: Even though this video seems to fit both Ryan and Steiner’s definitions, even though it has a clear temporal ordering that define its start and finish, and even though my own definition of narrative when we first discussed these two pieces in class should be sufficiently broad to encompass this video as an absolute example of a narrative, some part of me still wonders if it is. Are time, characters, and setting really enough? Can a start and an end of some event fully constitute a plot? Perhaps it’s because I know that the end of this video isn’t the end of the event, but it feels unfinished to me. I want to know more; I want to see how it wraps up. But for someone else, someone who wasn’t there, perhaps this video tells a satisfying story (or lets the viewer tell him or herself one). I’d be curious to know.

One final note: I wonder about the decisions made about the music for this video. Why this score? Why paced this way? On my third or fourth viewing of the video, I realized it wasn’t actually the music itself that fascinated me but the way it matched different segments of the action and didn’t — to me — seem to match others. The soundtrack is consistent here; it’s all instrumental except for the lyrics that come in right at the end and essentially serve as another signal that the narrative is done. I don’t know the source song well enough to know if it’s all one piece of music, but it certainly could be. What strikes me is how well it seems to gel with the (artificially accelerated) movements at the start and finish of the video, and how it seems out of place with the more natural-time sequences in the middle. And again, I think this has something to do with how I experienced the event. The first and last few scenes of this video really did feel that rushed, and the music seems a perfect soundtrack to the frenetic activity. But the middle segment, when the keynote speaker takes the stage, was a chance to breathe. The event felt like it slowed down at that point; the rush ended and time reverted to its normal pace. The video slows down, perhaps to mimic this. But the music pushes relentlessly on; it doesn’t let us rest.

Because I didn’t read the email instructions for the assignment closely, I ended up making a short video that is unrelated to my story.  Below is a link to the video and analysis of the video using Wingstedt, Brandstrom, and Berg’s article “Narrative Music, Visuals, and Meaning in Film” from last week:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TYsv9mZ2XE

For my video, I tried to borrow from Wingstedt, Brändström, and Berg’s understanding of the metafunctions of narrative music in film.  I used “The Ants Go Marching” to set the mood of the video.  The choice in music for the video has an interpersonal aspect in that the audience can only make a connection between the music and the video if they are familiar with the children’s song “The Ants Go Marching.”  Because this is an instrumental version of the song, the audience must have some background knowledge of the song lyrics in order for it to make sense.  I understood Wigstedt et. al.’s use of the term ideational aspect to refer to the aspect of music that helps the audience establish relationships between different characters or events in a film.  Given the length of the video, I was not really able to include one.  The textual aspect of the music was “The Ants Go Marching,” which is non-diegetic, given that it is not a sound that ants would hear in a typical setting.  At the beginning of the video is the introduction to “The Ants Go Marching” and the more recognizable part of the song starts to play as I show more ants and show them in action.  I looped a portion of the song and made it louder each time to put emphasis on the build up “action” in the movie, with the music loudest at the climax.  In some parts of the movie, I made the actual sound from the scene audible so that the audience would hear just enough to know what was going on. I hope that this video is a good example of Walter Munch’s idea of conceptual resonance, cited by Wigstedt et al. where the sound influences how the audience sees the video and the video influences how the audience hears the sound.

“Representation refers to the use of language and images to create meaning about the world around us” (Sturken and Cartwright, 12). I “get” this statement, but do different mediums inherently speak a different language? I ask this because I have both photos and video from which to create my final project. Additionally, because of confidentiality issues, I may need to extract audio from the video.

Video combines image and sound, but does this necessarily tell a complete story? Do the moving images distract from what one still image can convey? For example, a photo taken in a Los Angeles public school’s classroom shows a mix of two dimensional technology and three dimensional models. Also, there’s a photo of a covered smart board that’s in a storage closet. The snapshot freezes time, and audience members will likely grasp what’s literally in the image. What does this covered piece of expensive equipment signify in a world full of meaning? My interpretation is that technology isn’t always the solution. Meaning, the teacher has much more basic issues, one of which is limited physical space.

To review, my I290 Viz Narrative final project will attempt to tell the collective story of my current and ongoing side project, {Create every day.}  The premise is simple, create something every day (while being very flexible on the something.)  The philosophy and significance of the project comes from a desire to demonstrate how with discipline we can recognize that we are never too busy to pause and engage in a personal, creative activity each day.  Through my final project, I hope to “tell the story” of not just my creations but also the evolution of my creative self/approach over the course of the semester’s 90 or so days.

For today’s prescribed assignment, I took a crack at displaying my first 25 creations in a digital medium and making careful choices (some may seem simple, but I think they can have a powerful effect) for the format/medium based on topics we’ve discussed in class.  You can view the current gallery at http://kiwimonk.com/ss2/ .  I feel like I have the luxury (?) of continually developing my new content each day and the challenge of framing past content into the same story as creations that will be made towards the project deadline.  I won’t be able to fully decide on the types of images I take and then create all of my content according to specification, rather my work will show a natural progression of my ideas (and maybe even skills gained in class!)

The Steiner article brought up two concepts that registered with me.  First, was the notion of double ordering, how in a narrative there is a combination of the sequence of plot events and the times of the presentation of those events.  I feel I face two challenges with relating this to my project, the narrative of each creation (some do use multiple pictures in an order to show how I did something, which I wasn’t able to incorporate into the current medium–a flaw) and the overall narrative of the entire project.  With regards to this concept, I think it’s incredibly important to force a viewer to move through the creations linearly from 1 to n (hence the current format).  Steiner also discusses the repetition of characters and how they can create a narrative from unspecific events.  This lends itself to how I compose/document my creations.  I’ve started to include some repetition of certain tools (such as cardboard cutouts of myself) to characterize how these ideas are coming from a single person, me.  Also, I think there might be something with the consistency of environments (such as a back drop) or where pictures are taken that could be used to reinforce my story.

MacDougall comments on the physical presence of the maker in the piece (he’s talking about film).  But in my work, I have up until now I have (mostly) avoided including my face in the creations (though my hands are included from time to time).  My goal is to infuse my presence into the work without a campy direct illustration of me.  Macdougall distinguishes between how images can allow for this immediate connection with the creator unlike text and also mentions knowledge by acquaintance vs. knowledge by description, which has some applications to whether or not to include captions with my work.  So far, I am opting to exclude direct captions to focus on an interaction with the product over a forced (though potentially witty) account of what is present.

Finally, in Sturken’s piece, the topic of Representation comes up early and the distinction between reflecting meaning and producing meaning through images.  The example of still life with food is given and how the illustrations of food are constructed in a way to represent more of the “world of the food.”  This has me thinking about what aspects I might want to better represent during each one of my compositions.  For instance, one of my creations was a hollowed out book.  Thinking back, I may have been able to better represent some other qualities such as the stickiness of the glue, the jagged imperfections of each individually cut page, and the long late night required to make it happen.

My project is a continual work in progress (literally), and taking forward some of these concepts (and further relating to other readings) will be a valuable exercise to help stir some thoughts that will aid me tonight and future nights while I’m creating.

[1] Nanook of the North

[2] Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos

[3] Pink, Interdisciplinary Agendas in Visual Research: Re-situating visual Anthropology

These streets will make you feel brand new, Big lights will inspire you, let’s hear it for New York New York New York. I’m sure all of you have heard the lyric—felt the sensation as they talk about this great city(that I have never been to). I’ll be heading there 11 days from now to film my own version of that sensation. What started off as a small project of collecting pictures and videos that I would’ve taken on the trip is turning into a very detailed guide on how and when to shoot. I am putting considerable thought into the preproduction of the trip so that when I come back I know that I will have all the content that I need to finish the course project. This is very different from my typical approach of the documenting of some event. Usually it consists of a simple two step process: bring camera, shoot camera.

In this planning stage I need to develop at least a general idea of the type of documentary I will be shooting. This is a documentary of my trip, so reflexive was the obvious choice. In Barbash and Talyor [2] they describe this style as “the process of representation itself and foregrounds the relationship between the filmmaker and the spectators as well as between the filmmaker and the subjects.” I am the filmmaker and my subject, that will be the journey to New York and all the people and things that come with it. Like Flahery’s Nanook of the North[1][3], I will make no attempt to capture the trueness of the events that transpire on my trip (after all can such a thing be done? context upon context upon context), but instead take a reconstructivist approach. Just like Flaherty produced his film in collaboration with the Inuits, I will be producing my short in collaboration with the environment and people on the trip[1][3]. This is not to say that I will be staging events though. The scenes that I will be filming will all be impromptu captures of a reality that exists for people that know they are being filmed. I might even take a participatory role at some point. I figured I should just “recognize the ambiguity of visual meaning” and reconstruct the clips to capture the my sentiments as best as possible[3].

In this plan of mine there are a great deal of clips that I will be filming in environments that I have never filmed before. Places where you might not really see a camera guy floating around: Bars, clubs, early mornings in the hostels. I knew if I wanted to get this right when it mattered I would need to get some practice being the camera man in these types of settings. A perfect opportunity to practice presented itself last weekend at Kevin’s Bday celebration. Big camera in hand, I walked  over to the fun filled bar. Everyone is telling talking really loudly, telling fantastic stories of love, war, survival…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq-U0b4oNXY

I think the point is clear now, these are all examples of reconstructed clips of the events that happened that day. The reality was twisted a bit in each of the clips, but I think that the sensation of being there was captured in all of them.

First, some background info and explanation of the audio clip:

I am a GSR for Glynda Hull’s Kidnet project, which examines how youth communicate and construct global/local identities through a closed social networking site (www.space2cre8.com — it’s very similar to Facebook, with each student having a profile, “friending” capabilities, wall posts, instant chatting, media uploading, etc.). There are research sites in Norway, India, South Africa, Australia, NYC, and Oakland, and the students at these sites create digital stories, video “tours,” still images, artwork, etc. to share online. My site is the newest Oakland site, Oakland Military Institute (if you ever have a chance to visit, you should – it’s a great school with amazing digital resources). My co-instructor and I have now met with our group of 12 high schoolers four times, and they are gearing up to create their own digital stories to post on the site. Their assignment for this upcoming Saturday is to shoot footage for their own digital stories, and in preparation for this assignment, students watched videos from each site. Because we’re interested in our students’ critical thinking processes and their responses to their peers’ media artifacts, Jones (my co-instructor) and I decided to engage them in a K-W-L (What do you already know/What do you want to know/What did you learn) exercise as we watched videos. The audio clip I’m including here is of 2 minutes from our discussion before we viewed a “My Life” digital story from India.

How this relates to my project:

This audio clip illustrates the beginning of the OMI students’ digital story process: viewing examples, generating ideas before and after viewing, and understanding their audience. To be honest, I wish I could fast-forward to Saturday so that I had a clip of my students’ video footage and their director’s cuts (I plan on asking them to explain what they shot and why), because my project really focuses on if/how their videos reveal dialogical engagement with their space2cre8 peers’ videos, and how they (OMI students) construct meaning through these multimodal compositions. For my theoretical framework, I’ll be turning to Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia and social semiotics (the van Leeuwen and Jewitt chapter we read provides an overview of social semiotic analysis, and I’ll also refer to some of their other work and Kress’; additionally, Murch and Wingstedt et al. will aid my discussion of semiotic affordances of sound/image in the examined digital stories). Ideally, I would like to offer an overview of OMI students’ composition practices (do they consider other videos when they create their own digital stories? what do they choose to include/omit and why? are their videos explicit responses to others? if so, how is a dialogical relationship made evident?) and offer a semiotic analysis of one of my students’ digital stories.

OMI_KWL_excerpt[021211]

P.S. I used Audacity to edit this clip, but I’ll be using Final Cut Express in the future. I notice how loud some of the background noises are — any pointers/tips on how to decrease those would be appreciated!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/35542478@N04/?saved=1

This is a two minute clip of two high school students speaking about their experience with language. I selected this clip to address Collier’s notion of cultural identity in context. Collier argues that “Good research images contain complexity, they record associations and relationships, they are often unremarkable and take time to read” (3). In selection of this clip the intent was to communicate associations and relationships and therefore provide cultural and historical contexts for these young women. Both women discuss their experiences with bilingualism at school, at home, and with family members. My interest is in how much the audience can ascertain about the stories of these young women. How much of what is surmised is given by the students in the interview? How much is revealed by the camera lens?
I began the video in the middle of the conversation with the first student Maria. The hope here was to uncover what a viewer could deduce from what was being said without having the initial question. The camera lens informs the viewer that these are students, as they are filmed in a library, and a classroom respectively. The purpose of the initial research project was to uncover the relationship between mobile phone use and academic achievement. One secondary goal was to discover the connections between the mobile and transnational identity formation. Belinda the Chinese speaker informs the audience that her language is decreasing as she is unable to speak it as often, while  Maria talks of her determination to learn and speak Spanish. I cropped the video in order to remove as much of myself from the image as possible and to showcase Maria’s mobile phone. The mobile phone is featured at the end of Maria’s video to highlight the relationship between it and her language use. There is no mobile in Belinda’s video as she says she does not utilize it often other than to speak with her parents.
It seems that through the editing process the meaning and context can be altered. This raises questions for me about Collier’s concept of drawing conclusions from the entirety of the visual. The researcher through video production can alter and therefor frame/reframe the visual. Isn’t this necessary in order to have a complete product? How much does editing impact what the camera sees?

Breakfast

“The Time Machine”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k74pTdoohOM