With no real capacity for fiction writing (or really narrative at all) coming into this project, I had no stellar ideas to begin with. I decided to stick with a story I know pretty well: my autobiography. Riddled with an influenza-induced fever, I began writing a bizarre and exaggerated version of my life. With no clear point to this story/my life, I decided to go ahead and add on a projected fictional ending. I wanted the end result to look as pieced together as possible and to use one shot of my face repeatedly throughout the story. I was prepared for the most lo-fi method of creating the final product– Microsoft Paint. However, I managed to re-acquire Photoshop for a less complex method of creation. Whether the end result was any more clean cut than it would have been in Paint is debatable. Not wanting to draw all of my pictures and finding the Creative Commons photos on Flickr insufficient, I ceded to using Google Image search. Thus, I have a copyright violation-laden video.
While I found the visuals of my digital story to be relatively on target with what I was attempting to do, the audio proved much more difficult. I soon learned it was impossible to narrate in one take. Thus, I had to record small bits of sound, overlap, and line them up. To make matters worse, I was relatively horse while working on this part of the project. And only after I had finished did I notice all of the audible clicking noises from starting and stopping the audio. While I didn’t expect the audio or visual to be particularly aesthetically pleasing, I was at least aiming for a little comedy. I don’t think it really came across in the audio, and I’m disappointed by that.
As far as what parts of networking culture I drew upon, I would have to say the vast visual database of the internet/ the popularity of the Google image search. The story itself didn’t fit into any particular viral genre I’m familiar with. It was really just a digitally-updated autobiography.
Well, here she is: http://vimeo.com/10461896
The combination of a coherent if kooky narrative and a series of appropriately low-tech edited images makes this piece work. There are definitely elements of the narrative — meth-head community? weekly gang fights? — that are hard to understand in the context of the larger narrative, but the also add color to the story in a useful way. Using the same head cutout for all the images of you, roughly tacked onto various stick figures and other bodies throughout the piece, is an excellent choice: it gives the “you” in the piece (who can be connected with “your” voice in the voiceover) a continuity that might otherwise be hard to appreciate. Seeing that “you” interact with your sister, the kids in West Side Story, and Lady Gaga, the viewer gets a sense of “your” narrative coming through. Your Statement amply fleshes out your process of production, but your discussion of digital networked life in the piece could be more fully realized: the few sentences you end the Statement with don’t really convey why this particular format was more or less engaging that a written autobiography, although they certainly could. Overall, this a solid digital story in the classical mold: images, text, and personal voice-over; in that context it works very well.