I’m not sure how to proceed with my video essay. My audio essay was wholly grounded in my personal experience. Thus far, my video essay is on the opposite end of the spectrum: it is distantly universal. The video essay tries to explore speech not simply as a verbal tool, but as a physical and cellular mechanism as well. I used sparse narrative in an effort to limit the verbal, but again, that risks distancing viewers from the essay’s exploration. Even if I don’t include my brother and include instead my own shyness and difficulties with speech, how do I ground the viewer and make this piece more personal?

In most of the video essays we’ve watched, narration is key for the personal. In Sans Soleil, Chris Marker uses a woman’s voice who is presumably reading letters from the person filming the scenes. The letters are intimate in that the writer reveals his complex thoughts to this woman. Through the letters, Marker creates a highly meditative atmosphere: the audience ponders the letters and attempts to discover their meaning with the woman who reads them.

In The Voyagers by Penny Lane, the narration moves to a strictly personal narrative about 5:15 minutes in: “I remember when Carl Sagan died. I was in high school. I guess…you were in college?” Lane uses her own thoughts about the video’s more universal themes to move into her personal narrative that clearly alternates between the personal and the universal.

In these two videos, the personal emerges through the context of the narrative (Marker’s reading of letters) or through an explicit alternating between universal narrative and personal narrative (Lane’s movements from knowledge/hope to love). Both videos are effective, but I guess the question is: what do I want my essay to convey?

I want to go for meditative. Social anxiety or shyness seems distant from a pure meditation on speech in its many forms. I’m afraid that alternating to a personal narrative about my own social anxiety will necessitate new images and themes that will disrupt the desired flow of the universal in my essay.

What if the narration consisted of two people having a conversation about social anxiety? That way, the more universal images could remain undisrupted while the audience ponders the relationship between the two speakers. The conversation would be intimately detailed, yet the exploration would still proceed in visuals, suggesting that two conversations are occurring: one between the speakers, and another subliminally through body language and image.