Two Stories that are One
I have enjoyed and been challenged by the process of creating a screencast that attempts to fulfill an ambitious set of goals:
- To “[help] an audience to understand who [I am]”…
- …while “enable[ing] [me], the storyteller, to learn from the story…by finding a deeper meaning to [my] own story.”
- To “[prompt] the audience to reflect on their own experiences and look for larger truths about the nature of human experience.”
- And “to offer a narrative that activates the emotion of the audience, using a dramatic arc that includes a particular moment that illustrates an insight.”
The final item on that list has been in one way the most important consideration for the story I’m telling, because this story depends not on a moment *inside* the narrative, but on a moment in the telling and hearing of the narrative. In other words, the structure here is based more on audience than on character, which seems like a particularly useful experience to have while studying the concept of digital authorship, where audience is such an intriguing combination of old ideas and new ideas. Digital authors have to be aware of audiences in all of the traditional senses of the word, while also being mindful of the comparatively new ways in which online communities can form around digital texts–see for example Renee Hobbs’s (2017) discussion of parasocial relationships in Create to Learn and Henry Jenkins’s (2018) insights about fandom in participatory online culture.
I want to avoid potential spoilers here–again, the story in the screencast really only works if a viewer encounters it without knowing much about its narrative arc–but without divulging too much I can say that, while I had the basic idea for this story for a long time, the actual process of preparing it for an audience made me think about it in new ways. On the one hand, the script ended up being perhaps 90% what I would have imagined a year or two ago, when this set of ideas about identity and our feelings and thoughts about what we’ve earned and what we deserve was percolating. I knew most of what I wanted to say, in terms of written words.
Images and recorded sounds, however, were a different matter. Regarding the audio, I realized early in the creation process that I wanted the only sound to be a single human voice, which seemed at first to simplify things. This story involves the side-by-side comparison of parallel narratives. Using one speaker would mean that both narratives were told “in the same voice,” which fit with various structural goals, and not using sound effects seemed to me to fit with the idea that we are hearing unvarnished items from each of the two narrative arcs. Once I was actually rehearsing, I realized how many performative complications there were in something so apparently simple. I needed not to let my voice betray, through intonation or pace or volume, special emphasis for one or the other of the narratives, or even for specific pieces of either narrative, except insofar as I wanted to create clear parallels and contrasts. It is possible, I think, to create a contrast that is not by definition a value judgment, but it is not easy. It may be even less easy to use one’s voice to create vocal contrast without the voice sounding like an instrument of judgment.
In a similar way, choosing the images for the slides made it clear just how vital image-reading skills are in image curation (and image creation, though here I was almost entirely in the curation realm). It was easy enough to decide that for every individual slide with a side-by-side comparison, and for every pair of slides that fit together into a dichotomous system, the number, basic shapes, and rough sizes of the images needed to be either identical or clearly parallel. It was significantly more difficult to make decisions about exactly what images to plug into those carefully-matched structures. I couldn’t afford to have one or the other narrative seem more (literally, and therefore figuratively) colorful, or angular, or prone to shadows, or bright, or dim, or fuzzy, or clear–unless, that is, I wanted to steer the audience’s emotional reaction.
And I realized as I worked that of course I wanted to do that…while appearing not to be doing that! So I made sure that, for example, fonts and text sizes and colors were interchangeable, and I worked to create sets of images that at least appeared to be “evenly matched” in some given way/s. At the same time, I knew that issues like which images contained human beings as opposed to inanimate objects, and which images showed things in motion as opposed to at stasis, were going to push and pull the audience’s reactions. When it comes to considering images as sets as opposed to as single items, a slideshow provides a particularly useful object lesson in the power of sequence: as I drafted and revised the placement of images, I became more and more conscious of the audience effects of, say, following a zoomed-out image with a zoomed-in one, or using a centered image to lead into an off-center one. I was constantly thinking of Scott McCloud’s seminal book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, which was for years part of my instructional practice in multimedia reading.
By the time I had created the sixth and (for now, anyway) final iteration of the screencast, I was hearing the two narratives differently than I had when I first heard myself perform them, which in turn made me reconsider whether they “mean” what I originally suspected they meant. In that way, this process was exactly like the process of putting together one of my four collections of poetry–while at the same time being completely and utterly different. It’s all curation as authorship–but that authorship functions differently depending on the form of curation being undertaken.
References for this essay:
Hobbs, R. (2017), Create to Learn. Malden: Wiley Blackwell.
Jenkins, H. (2018). Fandom, negotiation, and participatory culture. In P.
Booth (Ed), A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (pp. 13–26). Routledge.
McCloud, S. (1994), Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. William Morrow.
References for the screencast:
All photos of Hungary, Fulbrighters to Hungary, and the author are courtesy of the author.
Fulbright and NMSC image sources:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/exchangesphotos/26311859025
and
https://www.nationalmerit.org/s/1758/start.aspx?gid=2&pgid=61
All other images are open-source Unsplash images. Creator credits, in the order in which images appear: Tim Mossholder, Ivan Aleksic, Robo Wunderkind, Jens Lelie, Pedro Lastra, Wes Hicks, Dulcey Lima, Jessica Furtney, Kimberly Farmer, Crissy Jarvis, Joshua Hoehne, Ben Hershey, Unseen Studio, Good Free Photos, Andres Siimon, Mimi Thian, Artturi Jalli, Mitchell Luo, Nathan Dumlao, Justin Shen, Erica Thomas, Simone Secci, and Unsplash Plus in collaboration with Planet Volumes.
