CYOA Week 5: This Must Be The Place

http://vimeo.com/thismustbe

For this week’s Choose Your Own Assignment, I want to share this series of short videos with you all. We’ve already examined narrative nonfiction through a few different mediums other than writing and video seems like the logical next step. I think these videos have a lot to teach us about profiling people and places in unison. I know many of us in the class are preparing to write profiles of places, but those of us profiling people also cannot ignore the importance of context when telling another person’s story. These videos also might serve as inspiration for our upcoming picture/audio slideshows. Besides all that, they’re fun to watch (and Detroit gets the spotlight in one video!). So please take the time to watch all four of these videos and consider these questions:

Pay attention to the audio. How do the filmmakers manipulate and balance music with talking? How do you feel about it and how does it make you feel?

Consider the pacing of these films. What can we pull from these examples in film to apply to our writing? Does the narrative feel disjointed? Unified? Both?

Obviously, pictures and film express information differently than words. What, if anything, can be transferred to our profile writing from the images and visual styles used in these videos?

Who do you think is the target audience for these films? What message(s) are the creators trying to send with each film individually and with the series as a whole?