This week is about editing our video essays. It was a long and difficult journey to figure out how I should adapt my audio essay to a video one. I don’t want to screw this one up like I did with my audio essay. As a student you have a lot of pressure with Thanksgiving and the finals coming, so I need to prepare very well. But this is nothing in contrast to Penny Lane’s situation in 2010. She has made a video essay for her wedding. As a present for her husband Brain. With all the wedding guests watching it at the party. The essay is called The Voyager and shows the two Voyager space probe launched into the orbit in 1977, just one year before her birth. Lane combines her ideas of love and marriage with the historical NASA event, the love story of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan and the dramatic explosion of the rocket in 1986. She uses the harsh contrast of cordial love and innovative technology to explain her view about commitment and relationships in nowadays society.
In the Atlantic interview, Lane said that the video is a meditation on the nature of love in an uncertain universe. The Voyager storyline or rather the golden record function’s is to connect irrational hope and cold hard reason in a metaphorical way. I really needed this information, because I was very confused why Lane combines her personal love story with the Voyager plot while watching the video. At first, I thought that Carl and Ann may be her parents and she is telling the audience the story of her love relationship, which just happens to be close to the Voyager event. She was born in 1978, so the math is right. I finally understand her point when she is talking about marriage while walking with her boyfriend on the boardwalk at Coney Island.
According to the Atlantic, Lane wants to explore the mature and intelligent vision of love with this film. But I really liked her last words, just before the song The Book of Life began (by the way very corny…). She said that we have to risk and open ourselves to connect with others, even if there’s the possibility of disaster. Nobody believed that the two Voyager missals would last that long, since they were supposed to last only two years! I enjoyed this positive look ahead, after the confusing beginning.