This week has been focused on creating my visual artefact and viewing and commenting on other fellow students’ artefacts. I have been really impressed by the quality of the work we have produced as a group. This week I felt more connected with other students by viewing their work and commenting on their blog – and reading other people’s comments. It was an excellent exercise in getting the group to interact.
My own artefact was a video (or rather two videos) but it was not purely visual. I agree with Sterne that it is easy to focus on the visual and neglect sound. Music played an important part in getting the message across in my videos. Without the music, the visual by itself has much less impact and, I think, makes much less sense. The music sets the scene and emotional tone of the visual. Plus I added text at selected points in the video to get across the message I was trying to make in the video. I suppose I could say that as author of the videos, I used a multi-modal approach in order to ‘control’ how my video was interpreted. This is counter to what Kress is arguing.
“Speech and writing tell the world; depiction shows the world. In the one, the order of the world is given by the author; in the other, the order of the world is yet to be designed (fully and/or definitively) by the viewer.” p. 16
Years of academic training made it difficult for me to let go and let the viewer decide. Reflecting back now, maybe I should have tried to make a piece about the digital world that could be interpreted as either utopic or dystopic – depending on the predisposition of the viewer. But I don’t think I am capable of doing that at the moment.
Andy commented about the skills I possessed in creating the video and felt he was not as skilful. (Ironically, I thought his video was very well produced – which I think I commented on his blog). I know the faults in my production! I couldn’t get things synchronized the way I wanted and the transitions got out of place when I speeded up the video so I did the best I could in the end. It is true, that I already had a Flip video camera (and have bored my family endlessly the last few months videoing them) and I have Camtasia Studio which I got to produce training videos but I have never produced such a complex video before. And I am glad that this course made me stretch myself. But I chose tools that I was at least a bit familiar with. I really like the look of Prezi but I quickly decided that that is something I’ll explore in my own time rather than experiment with for this exercise.
