Hey guys, as you should know we are living through a global pandemic and a historic event. We are all primary sources when it comes to living in this time of social distancing and our accounts could be used to teach others about this pandemic in the future. So why not make a film showing others what it would have been like to live in the Coronavirus pandemic? Well, that’s exactly what the PLP 9 class was asked:
How can we, as video storytellers, tell stories of our community during this period of physical distancing?
To put it simply, we were to create a video that showed others the effects of the pandemic in certain communities of people.
It took me a long time to figure out what community I wanted to focus on because so many of them had been deeply affected by they Covid-19 pandemic. However, I finally decided on the dance community since I was fairly involved with it and had felt the impact the pandemic had on the community. But of course, this wasn’t about how it had affected me as part of a community, it was about of our community had been effected as a whole. That meant that I would of course have to interview some other members of the community, I decided on my sister, my friend Paige, and my friend Rhiann. Interviewing these girls gave me a lot more insight into how much the community had been affected by the pandemic since I wasn’t as involved as my sister or Rhiann was. The main thing they talked about was not being able to see their friends and socialize like they used, they also talked about loosing out on going to competitions and not being able to participate in the year end show. Because of these interviews I was able to narrow down what I wanted to talk about in my video to the social impacts of the pandemic and create a story spine that was a key part to me answering the driving question.
One of the main parts of the project that I think really helped me answer the driving question of this project in my video was actually creating a soundtrack in GarageBand for it. I already had some experience with live loops and auto-play loops already so I got to focus more on how I wanted to tell the story of my community through the music. The main idea I went into creating this soundtrack with was that I wanted it to be reminiscent of an actual song from a ballet since my video was about the dance community. I was able to do that by using a lot of auto-play loops of violins and piano live loops since both instruments are prominent in ballets. While creating this song I also wanted it to tell a story and in a way creating this song actually helped shape how I put together my video. To tell the story of my community with this soundtrack I decided to start simple then continue to add on instruments and bringing the energy level of the piece up fairly high. I then had a violin track go to higher and higher notes until it felt like an all time high, then I dropped it all the way down with a deep drum.
I did this to show how everything had been getting better and better in dance then Covid-19 came along and turned it all upside down. The next part was a continuation of that deeper and darker feeling showing how awful that time was for us. Like I said before, it really helped me in my creative process when it came to actually creating the video.
Finally, after all of the preparation it was time to actually create the video. By this time I already had an idea for what I wanted my video to look like and how I wanted to tell the story but when I actually started to make it I found that I ended up changing a lot. I start my video making process by actually creating a mental script and matching dialogue I already had in my head to shots I had wanted to use so it would make an understandable video. This is the step where I come up with how I want to show my answer to the driving question in my video and where main pieces of information would be placed in the video.
Once that was done I write an actual script that I usually follow pretty closely but sometimes it’s more of a rough idea of what I want to say. I’ll change it based on how the flow of the video is going and what I think will sound best. In this video’s case I wanted it to be extremely personal and straight from my heart so I ended up changing a lot of the dialogue when recording so what I was saying felt more genuine and hopefully help answer the driving question by showing the genuine impact of the crisis on community members. As for the video itself, i really just wanted to show the impact of social distancing on the dance community by showing everything that we were missing out on and the people that we were all missing ourselves. But without further adeu, here is the final video for this project.
So to answer the driving question: as video storytellers, we can tell our story of our communities in this pandemic by using the media and technology available to us in a way that make the audience feel as though they are experiencing the impact along with the community. I hope that you have enjoyed learning about my process when creating this film as it was extremely fun to make and could even be used as a part of history classes in the future. Finally, I wanted to say hang in there, this won’t go on forever so as long as we all stick together we can make it through this.