I think I spent more time on my final documentary for this class than have for any other school project ever. Luckily, it was a lot of fun, so it didn’t really feel like work. Planning/scripting
took a few dedicated days, the interviews (including sending emails,
checking back for permission, and getting clearance) took about five
hours, filming myself took about six hours since my first attempt had
horrible sound, and editing the footage together took about twenty four
hours, on and off. I was also trying to teach myself Final Cut Pro 10 as I went, so that added a bit of difficulty. However,
I started early enough so that I was able to throw myself into this
project without worrying about the time constraints. I’m glad that I did. I’m very pleased with how it turned out. At the moment, I don’t really think I’d change anything.
The one thing that I imagine I’m never going to be completely happy with is the captioning. The transcribing wasn’t especially difficult after I made the choice to keep it as simple as possible. While
a lot of the time I spent on preparing and scripting my documentary was
spent on humor as a way to draw people in, I realized when I started
captioning that I wouldn’t be able to translate a lot of the jokes to
the transcript. I’d be
impossible for me to describe the different visual gags and still have
them retain a humorous impact, so I decided to simply eliminate them
from the caption completely. I decided to let the black and white text of what I and others said speak on face value. I
think the ridiculousness of my contributions and the seriousness of
what others said still came through well enough without the jokey
framing. I was lucky enough to
get strong responses from the people I asked, so I believe that impact
of the answers held up without the humorous foundation.
Captioning was the last thing I did. Once I had the documentary completed, I watched it on one computer while taking down all the dialogue in Notepad on another. I then uploaded it to YouTube, downloaded it back, adjusted the timestamps, and put it back on again. I
might go back in and caption the highlighted responses, but I don’t
know how that would fit in with the dialogue without seeming abrupt and
out of place. I may just add them to the description instead, but even that may be cluttered. I’m unsure. I’m never going to be completely satisfied.
I didn’t have a specific audience in mind as I was beginning the process. I just knew I really wanted to ask the question “How has the internet changed the English language?” My plan was to get my responses and let the conversation evolve from there. The
final product certainly didn’t get deep into a conversation on the
subject, but touched on a lot of different perspectives well enough. In
retrospect, I think the audience would be people who haven’t quite made
up their mind on the subject of the internet and English and are open
to seeing the different ways people look at it. As
my sister’s response indicated, people don’t often consider this
question on a non-superficial level, so it’s something that could use
more investigation. If nothing
else, I hope they were at least entertained enough to stay with the
video as my interviewees got to voice their opinions. If this video made even one person think about this, then I’d be happy.
I’d also like to think that the way my documentary was presented means that it would have a broad appeal. I learned this semester that “humor” could be an effective rhetorical strategy. If anything, that was the one thing I really hoped to apply here. Beyond
that, I tried a few different methods of shot composition during my
part by keeping myself mainly off screen during one part, and leaving
the screen entirely during others. Having a picture of myself in the background kind of made these choices a bit less severe, but they were deliberately made. Additionally,
I tried citing people’s qualifications to add to their ethos, but I
also played off of that by citing odd qualifications for certain people
and saying that I had written twenty three articles and received
thirteen awards for them. That was untrue, but it’d be an ethical appeal if it were. I think my acting sad and upset would qualify as a pathetic appeal. And getting responses from people that were purely text would be a way of focusing on the logical aspects of their argument.
The
biggest challenge for me (outside of learning a new program and finding
the time to do all the work I wanted to do) was compiling everything
together in an accessible form. I
got a lot of responses, and they were all either extremely well thought
out or important based on medium they were sent (steam webchat, gchat,
etc.). I didn’t want to cut people’s responses down too much because I wanted to let people speak for themselves. However, in the interest of saving time I was forced to take highlights of people’s responses and present those separately. If people wanted to go back and read the full responses, I left a moment in the video for people to pause and read them through. One of the benefits of HD was that I could leave very small text on the screen and still have it potentially be readable.
My other major concern was that my humorous way of presenting my documentary would put off some of the contributors. I think it was fairly obvious by the end that my position was “people who think that the internet is ruining English are just being silly,” but some of the people I talked to didn’t quite feel that way. I didn’t want them to feel personally mocked. I hoped that by including everyone’s entire response, they wouldn’t feel that way. Despite what I said, they’d still get to speak for themselves.
My other major concern was that my humorous way of presenting my documentary would put off some of the contributors. I think it was fairly obvious by the end that my position was “people who think that the internet is ruining English are just being silly,” but some of the people I talked to didn’t quite feel that way. I didn’t want them to feel personally mocked. I hoped that by including everyone’s entire response, they wouldn’t feel that way. Despite what I said, they’d still get to speak for themselves.
The
one thing I hoped to confirm in my documentary that I learned in this
class is the legitimacy and importance of the internet as both an
academic, personal and even artistic medium of exchange. It continues to evolve, and the evolution of language is part of that. Trying
to stand in the way is not only impossible, but potentially harmful to
the collective effort to share information and learn from it. The internet reaches billions of people, and thousands more every day. With Web 2.0, the line between content consumer and content provider is increasingly blurry. With
this change (and growth) in demographic, change in the format of the
informational and interpersonal exchange is inevitable. I
tried to show in my documentary all the different ways people can use
the internet to communicate, and I hope that I showed the fact that
people are communicating is far more important than the nature and
structure of the communication. The fact that I was able to make and
proliferate my own documentary is proof of that. I
put a lot of myself into my final project, and if it was any good, then
hopefully that’s just one more piece of evidence that this increased
accessibility and ability to contribute to a discussion is a good thing
as well.
