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THESIS BLOG question: how can a demonstration of rhetorical strategies in time-based media enable makers and viewers to make critical decisions about their use and meaning? a list of things i believe to be true about this work march 2006 re-cap from full committee meeting on friday march third: the movie + machine drawings were too abstract and too 'graphic designey'. [note to self: if you throw stuff in the night before, it will look like it.] + 'suffering' typographic quote [it says 'the question is not 'can they reason', nor 'can they talk', but 'can they suffer?'] is also too self consciously graphic designey, and too preachy. my question to this is how do i present what i see as a great point while avoiding preachiness? + egg box segment -- box should be smaller. + type in the book section at the end has some gratuitous motion that becomes distracting from the message. + i need to understand the level of visual abstraction my audience is capable of and respond accordingly. i assume i was being too abstract in certain segments. the goal is not to abstract, but make concrete. + let the story tell itself, like the voice-over interviews tend to do. + personal memory could be added in somehow. either mine or other people's. + try breaking down into 15 or 30 sec pieces, maybe as a campaign. test how v.o. needs to change, or how other elements fit together to tell a clear story in a shorter time. then show how those work differently on the website. the website where example clips i've made will be shown with written critique and discussion of how the strategies work [or don't work]. + acknowledge that meaning is constructed individually within each viewer. + remind engagers/readers/viewers that they are telling their own story, as i am telling my own story in the examples. it's their own meaning they are constructing. + i can talk about my editing on the website -- my own process of cutting down sounds and visuals. how to determine what's important, what contributes to the story, technical issues, etc. + i can add in more definitions, issues, and content over time. + one of my advisors [i think] termed the site 'a demonstration of visual rhetoric in time-based media'. something to consider as a sub-title for the site. + recognize the time-shift involved from a public service announcement to a more documentary style approach. [documentaries obviously telling a more in-depth story] much to do before orals in two weeks.
february 2006 pedagogy: a method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept. the art or profession of teaching. temporality: the state of existing within or having some relationship to time. just quick notes to myself. don't mind me.
a re-cap of the last week or so: selected type studies: one -156kb :: two -1.1mb :: three -4.2mb :: four -696kb sound studies: one -916kb :: two -1.1mb :: three -392kb :: four -380kb things i learned from these studies, and other happenings
last week: > i sort of reverted back to a more confrontational and literal attitude about the subject matter when i was thinking of what words to visualize. i think i tried to keep it somewhat experiential, but it somehow still feels didactic. > helping the viewer to
question things for themselves is a better approach. kelly murdoch-kitt,
a prospective grad student and local freelancer, mentioned to me that
an animal rights movie we both recently saw was very polarizing in its
traditional use of shocking imagery -- lots of violent slaughterhouse
scenes, neglect, abuse, etc. based on that, i think those techniques reinforce
adherents while forcing others into a corner of sorts, with a few different
possible outcomes: 1. block it out of one's mind due to the overwhelming
nature of the imagery, and therefore do nothing. 2. dismiss it as untrue
and the authors as 'loonies', despite the clear visual evidence just seen,
likely because it seems so extreme. as in 'there must be some perverted
liberal agenda these crazies are pushing.' 3. belief in what was seen,
but overwhelmed with the weight of it all, resulting in a 'paralysis of
inaction'. > the above issue holds true for sound. it can be suggestive, evocative, and experiential, or very literal and didactic. > sound is a wonderful thing, able to engage the imagination more readily than visuals [either type or image]. it can be more open-ended in terms of what it conjures in the viewer's mind and is therefore [possibly] more participatory. in that way, it is quite similar to reading a novel. > sound can be spatial just like visuals can -- it can evoke a sense of place, of scale, of moving through a space. next steps: work on my list of statements/beliefs/facts about this work. sheesh, i'm long winded. sorry.
another head-spinning conversation with mister brock. tony mentioned his quite successful (in my opinion) student project in information graphics. students react differently to visualizing the information when they are told 'it's a storyboard for a motion piece' (in effect, a sketch) versus being told to design an information graphic. the results are very different. tony didn't say, but my assumption is that the former is much more interesting, because the students aren't working off of assumption of what an 'information graphic' should look like, and the visual result bears the evidence of the sketching struggle -- it's more loose or 'messy' in certain ways. i think of the drawing process where one can see the mistakes, adjustments, eraser marks -- the decision making process is visible in the work, and it looks like a drawing and not a photograph. tony mentioned that in this project, sketching and production happen simultaneously. i'm wondering how this plays out in video, if at all. i understand that i can 'sketch' in video -- trying out a range of possibilities -- but i'm just not sure how to make the process evident. i probably shouldn't worry about that, but just be making things instinctively and see what comes out. perhaps it's more of an 'assembly' or 'collage' process of editing from a wide variety of footage. [for the sake of clarity, i'm using the term 'video' in a loose and all-inclusive way, as opposed to the more unweildy and highbrow-sounding 'temporal media'.] it feels like the issue of rhetoric in this medium is slowly coming into its own, rather than just borrowing from previously established fields like speech, writing, or the political poster. i'm viewing the persuasive attributes of rhetoric within video as being more about the use of video-specific attributes such as duration, transitions of all types, the character of motion, mise-en-scene, etc. those are the elements (words chosen) and how they are used are rhetorical (tone of voice creating effect). rhetoric is also, of course, those traditional things like irony, metaphor, narrative point-of-view, but i want to hone in on the strategies that are inherent to motion/video/'temporal media', and not easily transferred to other mediums, like metaphor is. things to consider and ask myself: > increase frequency and range of exercises. > possibly work across formal gradients, such as raw to polished (may be hard to do as a 'diy designer' with limited means) > build an environment (website housing video examples) for viewers to question video, not just watch public service announcements. > can a 'diy-er' make these movies? consider the audience's abilities and tools -- do they only have a camera and imovie, can they do simple drawings or stop motion animation? utilizing the same tools as the audience may relate more readily to the viewers. > consider working with just the egg as my subject matter, approaching the work as a series of exercises using limited subject matter. what all can be done with just an egg? > are my videos examples of questions about the essence of video, or are they 'finished commercials'? what does each method afford for and communicate to the viewer? > next step: play with type and sound (sound effects, music, voice over) -- four of the five communication channels i've yet to deal with.
a review of my meeting with tony from last week. >> images themselves have rhetorical qualities, references, connotations as do editing styles. so image quality is important, and rhetoric can be expressed formally. >> this isn't for a madison avenue crowd. it's for common people who have limited means and should look accordingly. >> i'm creating an experience and not a commerical.
film/motion has the greatest power to be experiential, and i should take
advantage of that. >> i need to focus on filmmaking and not graphic designing, or at least reside in that space between the two. >> in the best examples of motion that really make
use of time, storyboards don't explain anything. the medium isn't easily
translatable. so based on that info, i took one very specific idea --
the tiny size of battery cages -- and sought to experiment with that idea
to make the chicken's experience more real for the viewer.
january 2006 first full committee meeting [tony brock -- chair, meredith davis, and kermit bailey] was yesterday. no confettii flew and i was not carried out of the office on the shoulders of my professors, but i think it went pretty well. i believe i'm still on the right track; it's just that the track is providing much more friction that i had originally envisioned, thus preventing me from winning the fantastic prize of 'best thesis ever, anywhere'. the problem with study 1 [10.2 mb] was that the information was too layered for a new viewer [someone not familiar at all with the subject matter] to comprehend why a factory farm would elect to starve hens. well, of course everyone knows it's to shock their bodies into laying more eggs. kidding -- not everybody knows that, but it is true. the other issue was that i needed to generate empathy for my subjects -- people just think of chickens as food and don't think about them having personalities, feeling pain, being in misery, etc. meredith mentioned the baby harp seals and how the appeal to end their killing for fur rested largely on generating empathy for them because they're so darn cute, and it worked. so my new baby harp seal is the newborn chick. i sought make the motivation [for the actions of factory farms] more clear this time around, as well as changing to more compelling subject matter: another piece of the 'egg industry pie' is that baby male chicks are useless since they can't lay eggs and don't grow big enough or fast enough to be raised for meat, so they are killed, usually when only a day old. i spent -- we'll call it six days -- working solely on concepts and storyboarding those out. tony suggested trying for some humor -- a strategy where i make them laugh at the subject matter then make them feel guilty for laughing. so i played around with that and thought i had some good stuff. well, this time i've overlooked the connection between killing chicks and eating eggs, aka, 'relevance to the viewer.' also, while i had some good breadth of story concepts, many were edited in the same way. i had used a single seamless flow of imagery, and need to make use of some editing techniques [scene-to-scene transitions and the like] that will allow me to add in another story, such as someone buying or eating eggs, or an egg commercial. the two stories will then be antithetical -- one of the many amazing rhetorical strategies on my list! what a sublime coincidence. other things to consider, in convenient bullet format: and then there's the complicating possibility that my subject matter may be incorrect. read on if you care to... tony told me today that his wife, kristy [who is in the vet program at ncsu and has reportedly visited factory farms] said that the practice of killing male chicks does not exist, that they are often raised for lower quality meat products like pot pies, soups, etc. my primary content source, 'meat market: animals, ethics, and money', says that this happens to 'spent' hens [too old to lay eggs productively], but makes no mention of it in the context of male chicks. the book says chicks are most commonly killed by being ground up in what other online sources call a 'macerator', while some hatcheries just throw them in trash cans where they suffocate or are crushed under the bodies of other chicks, and a few of the more humane hatcheries gas their chicks. these claims have been echoed by numerous sources found online, but which have no sources cited. so i'm currently trying to figure out how to address this situation, since both sides [egg industry and animal rights groups] have their specific spin on things. i certainly don't want this to turn into a study on finding reliable sources of content. it's a design problem, not a content problem.
1.25.06 a quick re-cap on what's been happening lately: 1. creation of two audience profiles
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pdf 2. matrix of rhetorical strategies
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pdf 3. identification of strategies most conducive to
temporal media 4. selection of specific content for first study 5. storyboarding and production of study 1
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movie [10.2 mb] basically there were several fundamental flaws with the first study. one was that the motivation wasn't very clear -- why does this happen? another problem is that i didn't build empathy for the characters by showing them up front. meredith read it more like an amnesty psa and mentioned that it's a bit of a letdown to discover it's only chickens. i was also attempting to mix in a rational appeal with my emotional appeal -- meredith suggested going full tilt toward a strictly emotional appeal for greater clarity of message. after discussing other aspects of the treatment of layer hens, i decided to move on to different subject matter that was even more compelling. 6. brainstorming for study 2 based on new content
it's cooking... i'll try to provide pretty frequent updates, images, etc, in this spot. way to go, me! |