Reflection

My decisions in adapting my essay to video form involved carrying over as many metaphors as I could visually. First image and audio plays with the context of mass, revealing metaphors within itself, like how in the Voyagers the disc’s search for contact evolve into a metaphor for love—finding it and losing it—the layered meanings then work as an enigma for deeper connections.

Catholic mass worked as a sort of enigma for Massachusetts and the T, which ultimately was a character for an authority. Just as the cold weather in Dust Off is used to represent the harsh reality of the 3 deaths, with an eerie echo of some divine figure’s hand involved in it all.  I was trying to go for something like this with mass, since to the religious, mass is a source of life. Whereas to the atheist or agnostic, mass can in fact be the source of life, but through a different lens. I wanted to create this duality, but with no clear indication of which is better, because my person experiences are supposed to convey this unclear indication as well.

The routine of the authority in the Catholic mass worked to mirror routines we individually have in our isolated lives, which I express through my life. The audience of the mass worked to mirror routines we have as groups, such as on the T, or with my footage outside in public. There were some instances I spoke of cold moments in life, and there was a piece with people in a part of the mass, outside in the snow.

The talk I have with the person on a bus is put with the visual of a mass leader praying symbolically to god for show, I did this to show how I felt about the control of the situation. Couldn’t tell if it’s authentic or unauthentic practice. This was supposed to tie into my enigma of mass, it’s an omnipotent authority that also may be deceiving us. The mass leaders, the dude on the bus, there is some deception. I didn’t quite want to focus on this though, the important part was to connect this to when I was younger. Nobody watched me as I grew older, or I thought. This guy on the bus proved to me that people do sort of care, and we may mask it in something deceptive. This also connected to the audience of a mass, they’re being deceptive too, so the stuff sort of harmonizes well, like in Voyagers, Humanity’s great project is basically used as a marriage proposal for two, which is then used as a marriage video for Lane.

I used the image of the T to sort of turn around the visual metaphor of physical and religious mass. So originally the mass is visually catholic mass, while vocally it’s the T. You know because of the Audio Essay—which I assumed my audience has seen—so ending visually with the T allowed the audio to carry and convey the catholic mass context. This was something I came up with sort of fast, but wanted to get the idea in there for future development.

Something I really played with in the video essay were the opacity keyframes, and the audio fade frames in Premiere. I realized these can signal changes, and if sequenced properly, clearly communicate the intended change. So I added a lot of key frames, as a way of really letting the close observer see the connections. The audio increased or decreased based on the emotion I felt was being conveyed. I used the opacity keyframes to sometimes signal these emotional changes—darker images came in as creepy and darker thoughts appeared and would brighten as I came out of those thoughts—revealing a more intentional control over how I’m expressing my personal experiences.  It’s not like this is some depressing memoir, it’s a visual metaphor using my personal exploration of emotions.

The problem with doing so many key frames, my editing process became cluttered. So I started developing my visual essay like you would a textual essay. Each individual word, hell even letter, is placed to look a certain way, and it conveys more of what you wanted to say. So I decided to mark my keyframes, audio, and visual media clips. This let me see if I had too many keyframes in one clip versus another. Because if I wanted to channel the darkest moment at a certain clip, I figured I better put the most opacity keyframes there. This seems simple, but holding yourself to an artistic layout while using the software is a challenging reward. Also the fun allows me to completely change any of my audio or visual clips with ease. I found that simply adding in the same exact key frames at the same points would work so long as I re-record mirroring the original clips layout on the Premiere grid. Without much worrying about what the changes will do, because I’ve kept such wonderful track appearance.

I’ve added this to my reflection, because I think scaffolding a certain organization is important for media essays, and I wish I did it for my audio essay. I understand however that a creative process such as this doesn’t always work best with such scaffolding. Anyways, this perspective was sort of instilled from my Reading the Graphic class. In comics theory there are certain principles visually that we are subject to, and I was trying to add those using the opacity keyframes. Again, it was a bit novice, but more for sake of practicing the scaffolds of media work with an experimental essay.