With covid19 spreading like a wildfire, we have to now quarantine to stop the spread of the virus.  With everyone now quarantined, many communities and businesses have had to adapt to the changes.  Our driving question for this project was how can we, as video storytellers, tell stories of our community during this period of physical distancing?  For our project, we had to create a video essay about the global pandemic we’re living in and how it has affected our community.  Below are three milestones that I thought helped me with creating my final video essay and helped me with answering the driving question.

Milestone 2: Research

The first milestone that was very usefull for me was the second milestone.  For this task, we had to choose a storytelling method/diagram.  Once we chose a storytelling diagram we could start constructing our story.  We broke it up into 5 different parts.  Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, and Conclusion.  This helped me in answering the driving question because it helped me set a plan for how my story was going to flow.  With each part I had a different topic to talk about which helped with organizing what I was going to talk about for my video essay.

Milestone 3: Original Composition

Milestone 3 is another milestone that I thought helped me better understand the driving question.  For this milestone, we had to  create an original song in garage band.  We learned about all of the different loops and sounds that we could use to create our song.  We used different chords, melodies, harmonies and more.  This milestone helped me answer the driving question because music is a very important part of storytelling.  With music you can change the mood of the person watching.  For example, you should use more upbeat music at happier parts of the video and maybe slower and more relaxed type music when you’re just talking.

Milestone 4: Storyboard

The final milestone that helped me with answering the driving question was milestone 4.  For this milestone, we had to create a storyboard for our final video essay.  The storyboard is different from the storytelling diagram because the storyboard mainly organizes your shots for the video.  The storytelling diagram is more about the different parts of the story.  On my storyboard, I wrote out the different camera angles, audio, and what each scene was about.  This milestone helped me with answering the driving question because it taught me how to organize myself before filming to create a better video.  This helped with having a variety of different angles and clips so the viewer doesn’t get lost or bored while watching.

  • Scene 1 and 2

After completing all of my milestones, it was time to construct the video.  I had a lot of fun making this video and interviewing the different people and businesses in my community.  On top of learning a lot more about the coronavirus, I’ve also learned a lot more about my community.  Click below if you would like to watch the video essay I created.

From all of the milestones and tasks that I’ve completed throughout this project, I’m confident that I can now answer the driving question.  Looking back at the driving question “how can we, as video storytellers, tell stories of our community during this period of physical distancing?” I think that I can do this because of the technology that I have.  For example usually, I would be spending loads of time trying to find certain shots I want to get.  With physical distancing in the community, I had to plan out the specific shots that I wanted so I could get the footage as quickly as possible.  Another example to answer the driving question is with the interviews we had to conduct.  Usually, you would go to whoever you would want to interview and do the interview in front of each other.  Now with physical distancing, I had to get creative and conduct an interview using facetime.  These are just some of the ways that I needed to adapt as a storyteller telling a story during covid19.  Even though soon the pandemic will come to an end, I can still use the strategies that I’ve learned from this experience for future projects.