The War on Drugs…fail or nah?
This short film, narrated by Jay Z (Shawn Carter) and featuring the artwork of Molly Crabapple, is part history lesson…www.nytimes.comWht
- What is this video doing visually to communicate this message?
This video is messy, its not clean. The time lapse forces us to continue to focus on what is happening both visually and aurally. In a society in which videos longer than 10 seconds don’t typically do all that well, this one seems to understand that. Every few seconds the point of focus is changing which keeps the viewers engaged in what is going on.
The art being drawn, painted, whatever, is not pristine and its scattered. It goes along with the theme of the video. The war on drugs has been a mess, much like the setting around the canvas on which the time lapse is occurring.
2. What is it doing aurally?
Aurally this video does a few interesting things to keep the listener engaged as well. There are a few points where background audio sound effects are being used to bring the viewers attention back in. Things like a jail being locked up or the sound of money being thrown around. Not only does this bring our attention back in but it also hones in on driving the point home that Carter is trying to make.
With that, Jay-Z’s voice is raspy and more or less natural. While this is scripted, the tone and the way the words flow almost match the messiness of the images behind them. Everything in the video aurally matches up with the visual components at play which makes the video, form a aesthetic stand point, enjoyable to watch and listen to.
3. How does this medium impact/change the message?
The fact that this video is on the New York Times as opposed to BuzzFeed, NowThis, or some other Facebook friendly short video site, is interesting. It adds to the market of people that are going to see it and labels it as something we need to think about. The New York Times normally doesn’t tell us what to think about and any good citizen will go and do their research about the War on Drugs before coming to their own conclusion, but this is an interesting point of view from a very popular celebrity. While I don’t know what to think about the content of the video, The New York Times has now made it clear to me and all of us that this is something we should be thinking about at the very least.