Videography
Overview
In January 2020, I started working as a video creator, editor, and producer under the supervision of Dr. Aga Skrodzka. Skrodzka reached out to me and my colleagues regarding submissions for written essays and photography essays. Around March, Skrodzka informed us we could submit short films instead of written pieces. This project was completed during a four-month study under Skodzka.
This exhibition documents my role in the Writing to You from Quarantine short film. I will go over the design process, in depth, that occurred during this project.
About the Client
Dr. Aga Skrodzka is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Clemson University. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies from SUNY Stony Brook; M.A. in English from SUNY Stony Brook; M.A. in American Studies from Warsaw University; and B.A. in American Studies from Warsaw University. Skrodzka's recent research and pedagogy interests include world cinema, transnational classroom, gender and class politics on screen, (post)socialist visual cultures, and narratives of sex work. Skrodzka is the author of Magic Realist Cinema in East Central Europe (EUP, 2012) and the lead editor of The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures (OUP, 2020), which brings together thirty-three international scholars in a single-volume collaboration. She chairs the RCID Media Colloquium and is a member of the peer-review college for the UK-based journal Studies in European Cinema. In 2012-14, Skrodzka spearheaded the creation of Clemson University's World Cinema major. Supported by the Fulbright Scholar Fellowship, her current book project, titled Kinetic Bodies/Seized Subjects, focuses on the ways in which the image of sex slave circulates in the libidinal economy of late capitalism. Skrodzka taught ENGL8530 “Visual Rhetorics” graduate seminar I took while studying at Clemson University.
Exigency
Skrodzka, at the beginning of her seminar, reached out to my graduate colleagues and I, asking if we would be able to create essay film-related traditional or photographic essays. After a few months studying under Skrodzka, she offered my colleagues and I an alternative project submission: a short film. This project would not only expand on the essay film theories we were studying in her seminar, it would also apply those theories practically with the creation of an original essay film. After the new submission method was revealed, my colleagues and I had about one month left to create our projects focused on the art of the essay film.
The project goal was (1) to understand how the essay film is constructed and (2) to explore the essay film as an essayistic piece.
To reach these goals, I created a short essay film based on a quarantine poem I found on social media. This film parallels the harmful effects COVID-19 has on humans to the harmful effects climate change has on the earth. The video is a visual, essayistic representation of the poem.
Audience
The essay film was intended for my supervisor to review. As the project progressed, it became clear that there were three viewer/audience levels:
Primary - Dr. Aga Skrodzka
Secondary - Graduate Classmates, Future ENGL8530 Classes
Tertiary - Future Employers
Constraints
Throughout the design process, I encountered a few constraints, listed below:
All-Remote Completion
Like most of the projects in this portfolio, the entirety of this project was completed remotely. The accompanying course transitioned from in-person to remote instruction, but this project was completely online due to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent quarantine. This presented a few problems: opportunity for miscommunication, time management issues, lack of physical interaction between supervisor and videographer, etc. By utilizing online communication platforms like Zoom and email, and organizing a project plan with Skrodzka, I was able to combat most issues.
Timeline Management
The timeline for the project was technically four months. The project was announced around January 2020; however, submission details were not available until mid-March 2020. In April 2020, the project submission file types widened from traditional written pieces and photography work to short films. This provided aspiring videographers, like myself, the opportunity to compose, edit, and submit a short essay film. The timeline was already unbalanced due to the pandemic and quarantine, which further imbalanced the entire project development phases. Planning, material-sourcing, compiling, and editing a video would generally take a longer amount of time than a month, but with meticulous planning and set project checkpoints by my professor, I was able to successfully create an essay film.
Scope Creep
This project developed a scope creep from my original intent. This essay film was intended to be about the humor behind the pandemic, including a variety of memes about COVID-19 and its effects on the earth. As I was gathering resources for the video, though, I realized that the humor and memes did not fit well with my poem narration. Most of the resources I found—like my first reference, the poem—centered more on dramatic effects than comical intent. Since the poem initiated my project, I wanted to keep it as the narration for the video. The other sources—whether videos, images, or sounds—needed to revolve around the poem and its message. After emailing Skrodzka to request a change in scope, I redirected my essay film to the poem’s purpose: paralleling the earth’s climate change with humanity’s coronavirus.
Short Film
This section details design phases, informed theories, and collaborative work efforts of the video production process for Writing to You from Quarantine. The deliverable MP4 is included within this exhibition.
Essay films fit into their own genre. They are similar to documentaries, but they have specific elements documentaries do not always contain. Where documentaries are factual, essay films are unsure. They ask the viewer to think and ideate, to struggle. Corrigan defines the essay film as a formulation of 3 elements: “(1) a testing of expressive subjectivity through (2) experiential encounters in a public arena, (3) the product of which becomes the figuration of thinking or thought as a cinematic address and a spectatorial response” (Essay Film). While a documentary is about its subject, the essay film is about its subject and its subject connecting to its viewer. This is the spectatorial response films classified as “documentaries” do not ask for.
Out of the project submission file types, I chose to create an essay film because I wanted to practically apply the “essayistic” to film-making and test my knowledge of video production. This essay film personifies the coronavirus and parallels the destruction of humanity with the destruction humans have caused the earth.
Design Phases
The video went through the following design phases: (1) Research, (2) Sketch, (3) Iterate, and (4) Deliver.
Research
Most of the research for this project came from social media. I found Flyntz’s poem on Facebook. It had been reposted by a family member and came up on my feed. The memes I found for the project were sent to me by friends and classmates on Instagram, GroupMe, Snapchat, etc.
In terms of theoretical research, I mainly looked at practical applications of the essayistic into film. This occurred during Skrodzka’s course. Each week, the class was required to watch an essay film and define its characteristics. Out of the films we watched, I felt my film was most heavily influenced by Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil and Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I. Both mixed imagery and sound in a nuanced, reflective way. I wanted to emulate that.
Sketch
My aim, in this early part of the process, was to show how the relationship between the pandemic and the earth had become sensationalized by internet and social media users. There’s a humor that goes along with memes and trending topics (like the pandemic) that I thought would act as a self-reflexivity for the essay film.
Along with that self-reflexivity came a politically-charged element. The memes and other online resources I was researching prior had this political element to them. They were public and caused their viewers to take action in some way. These resources persuaded their viewers to think in somewhat of an unstable manner, to challenge their notions of ideology and identity. Corrigan names the essayistic as political in his book The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker: “the essayistic almost invariably practices, regardless of the subject matter, a distinctive form of politics, a politics quite different from the ideological and political strategies of narrative fiction films or conventional documentaries. In essay films, the subversion of a coherent subjectivity within the public experience of the everyday may not always be an easily decipherable and clear politics but is, perhaps always, a politics whose core is ideological instability” (33).
Part of the production process involved presenting my idea to Skrodzka and my fellow classmates. I compiled a lot of memes and humorous anecdotes for my presentation and ultimately for my first draft, but did not start creating the video yet.
My classmates seemed to like this idea. At the time, most of them did not have any feedback regarding how the film would be essayistic. A classmate did mention the tension from the humor and drama would balance out, similar to how a coin might stand on its side, not flipping to heads or tails. Due to the time constraints of this project, I started the drafting process almost immediately after presenting my first idea to the class.
I outlined the video and found that it was incredibly difficult to line up the humor of the memes with the seriousness of the poem. The instability from the memes did not line up with the instability from the poem. The memes challenged the viewer’s humorous identity while the poem challenged both subject and viewer’s whole identity. After planning for about a week, I emailed with Skrodzka and inquired about changing the scope of my project. This poem was dramatic and deep. It held a lot of meaning, not just for this video, but for the world as a whole at that time. It acted somewhat as sight into the unknown.
Iterate
Following the scope change, I had two weeks left to draft and produce a new video. I spent one week ideating and compiling new materials from various sound and video websites.
I then spent half of a week outlining where those videos would go in Adobe PremierePro, based on the lines of the poem. If there was a mention of fever, I wanted to show a thermometer. If there was a mention of flooding, I’d show the water level in a river rising. There were instances I wanted the viewer to see the literal imagery but be unsure about the meaning. The film was creating its own tension.
Along with imagery, I stuck with my original audio idea. I had another one of my classmates complete the voiceover as she had previous experience with instructional design and video narration. I think there’s an unexpected reflexivity with the video being produced by someone with an American accent but narrated by someone with an Indian accent. Accents are difficult to distinguish at times, so that indistinguishable sound in language adds to the mystery and uncertainty of who this narration is coming from or who it’s for.
By this time, I had about half of a week left to produce my new essay film. After receiving the audio from my classmate, I ran it through Adobe Audition and put a few noise-cancelling filters on it. I edited the gain levels and sharpened the tone without manipulating the vocals.
All of the video clips were laid out in Adobe PremierePro in order of their appearance with the letter. Train footage would come in with the trains. Animals would come in at certain points, either acting as the subject or the voice. I overlaid the audio, spread out the audio clips with intended silence, and added black backgrounds during those moments of silence. On one occasion, I intentionally overlapped the birdsong with the black screen. Up until that point, the black screen symbolized silence. There, it challenged that notion.
My video was saying: “You thought you knew what to expect from me. You thought you knew what I was. But you don’t know. Keep thinking. Keep trying to figure me out.”
Finally, I titled my video and added a credits sequence. I wanted the title to feel like a letter, though it ultimately looked a bit more like Avatar's Papyrus, I think. If I could have refined that, I would have changed the font style to something more sans serif, and I would have renamed it as relating more to the virus than to humanity.
Deliver
This project didn’t have a Refine phase. With the short timeline, I wasn’t able to revise parts of the project that should have been revised (i.e., inaccurately spliced audio). Ultimately, I turned in the second interaction, unrefined, in a MP4 format to Skrodzka.
Informed Theories
This project was heavily informed by essay film theories and theories on the “essayistic.” As mentioned above, most of the theories came from Timothy Corrigan’s The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker.
Corrigan redefines Aldous Huxley’s definition of the “essay” as these essayistic elements pertain to the essay film. The essay film (1) tests expressive subjectivity, (2) experientially encounters the public, and (3) resounds in the figuration of thinking as address and spectatorial response (30). The essay film sits at the intersection of the self, the world, and the abstract. Corrigan views the essay film as an act of dialogue. The essay film establishes a conversation, persuades its viewer, and connects with the spectator. It is about the self and Other, as the self tries to connect with Other.
In the case of Writing to You from Quarantine, this essay film destabilizes the viewer’s sense of self. I accomplish this primarily through my use of narration. The poem challenges humanity and puts humanity in the so-called “hot seat.” We, as viewers and listeners, strive to connect with the narrator as the narrator usually organically represents humans. Writing to You from Quarantine connects the viewer to the narrator through an indistinguishably-accented voice, but disconnects the viewer in its identity as COVID-19. In this sense, my essay film implicitly connects the self with Other.
George Lukács, another scholar of the essay genre, attempts to define the essay precisely in his essay “On the Nature and Form of the Essay” (Corrigan, pp. 21-40). Recalling his essay, it seems to ramble and ultimately, does not clarify what "essay" is; however, a passage on the second-to-last page seems to implicitly answer his question of "what is the essay?" Lukács writes "this longing for value and form, for measure and order and purpose, does not simply lead to an end that must be reached so thay it may be cancelled out and become a presumptuous tautology. Every true end is a real end, the end of a road, and although road and end do not make a unity and do not stand side by side as equals, they nevertheless coexist: the end is unthinkable and unrealizable without the road being traveled again and again; the end is not standing still but arriving there, not resting but conquering a summit" (39). The essay is about the journey the reader/viewer/listener takes. It's not about the end result or product. This "form" that Lukács attempts to define is actually unformed. The end of a road is not the end, but the entire car ride and journey along the way. It is the culmination of the journey. In the same way, my film is not directly formed as a letter from COVID-19 to humans. It asks the viewer/listener to look within themselves and reflect on their journey with COVID-19, their journey with climate change, their journey with health and the environment—just as I explored my own journey while I made this film.
Writing to You from Quarantine effectively sits at the intersection of the self, the world, and the abstract. We have the self, both in human connection and the challenging of humanity. COVID-19, in this case, is the human voice viewers hear and connect with. We have the world, addressed as the audience in narration but also the subject in imagery. The earth and its natural animal inhabitants is affected by climate change, just as humans are affected by COVID-19. We have the abstract, represented as the tension and uncertainty between the pauses in audio and video. With black screens and added silences symbolizing breaks in thought, the viewer is invited to reflect and to respond in those moments.
This project also included the use of online databases and websites. The materials and resources retrieved from the above theories and research methods (i.e., essay films versus documentaries) were technically and creatively represented in this deliverable.
Collaborative Efforts
This project was completed on my own. I received feedback from my supervisor and graduate colleagues throughout the drafting process, though, especially after the presentation.
Competencies
This project examines the following MAWRM competencies, which align with and demonstrate an understanding of writing, rhetoric, and media:
Visual communication theories
Research and design methods
Classical and modern rhetorical theory
Technological and media production literacies
Skills
Collaboration
Interpersonal communication
Email writing
Zoom meeting
Review and feedback
Content Creation
Storyboarding
Video production
Video editing
Project Management
Project planning
Presentation building
Time management
Adaptability
Software
Adobe PremierePro
Adobe Audition
Google Suite
Zoom
Other Soft Skills
Creativity and innovation
Attention to detail
Understanding of film studies environment
Deadline-oriented
Reflection
Reflecting back on this project, there are a few areas that I’d like to discuss: (1) Project Strengths, (2) Different Outcomes, (3) My Weaknesses, and (4) My Strengths.
Project Strengths
This project was successful not in terms of its original scope but in terms of its reimagined scope. The video embodied essayistic characteristics and kept with the theme of the COVID-19 pandemic speaking to humans about the pain and harmful effects it could have on our bodies, just like how humans negatively affect the earth. Humans are the virus, and I think the visuals combined with the audio helped reinforce my theme. The visuals, including the fade-to-black screens, were all chosen to specifically reinforce the audio—this is where I think the strengths lie. The lack of video and lack of sound was a deliberate, artistic choice to make the viewer think reflectively. This is but one of the many reasons this video was successful in its essayistic properties.
Different Outcomes
If I had the chance to redo this project, I would definitely change a little bit of it. In terms of the entire planning process, I would have started it earlier; however, I found that the less time I had, the more focused my ideas were. After my presentation, I had clarity that the humorous memes and serious poem would not fit well together. Without the approaching deadline, that pressure and clarity may not have come.
After submitting my short film, Skrodzka informed me of a similar film released by another videographer.
The similarities between the above video and my own film were close, but I had never seen that video. I think the essayistic aspects of my film separate it from the above video. The above video is informative, but it does not challenge itself. It's not preoccupied with its own failure, and it doesn't cause the viewer to self-reflect. It gets the viewer to think, but that thinking is something a bit more shallow. It's surface-level in its visuals and sounds. Within my video, we can see the intellectualism, language, and self-reflection in the deliberate pauses, black screens, nature sounds, etc. My video is figurative, poses ideas, and challenges the understanding of the how we perceive a virus, while this video forms a more literal meaning of the virus and its poem. If I had more time for research, I may have found this video. It could have informed my own film and helped me make something more unique.
My Weaknesses
Along with the outcomes, I wish I spent more time in post-production. There were a few technical edits that ended up with word splices. The title was also not as strong as it probably could have been. Overall, I would've liked more time completing the entire project, but a rushed timeline pushed my work. This was the first short film I ever created, save for a few commercials during my undergraduate career, and it proved to be a difficult project. Production took the most of my time, but post-production should have taken the longest. By refining the film, I could have improved the unintended breaks in certain words. Part of the essayistic is to establish one's self within the film, but the unintended breaks distracted the viewers/listeners, decreasing their ability to establish a relationship or identity from the film. Most of the audio-stitching did not do this, though, and with added silences and black screens, I created moments of self-reflection within not just the film, but the viewers as well.
My Strengths
Prior to this project, my undergraduate career soured me to video production, but after this essay film, I feel much more confident in my ability to produce videos. Though the video may not be professional quality, it’s an incredible improvement for me in terms of video production and editing. This project enhanced my ability to stitch audio and video together, create artistic pauses, and engage the viewer in planned silences. The self-reflection involved in this project, due to its essayistic nature, informed each and every one of the critical reflections I’ve written for this portfolio.
References
Articles
“An Imagined Letter from COVID-19 to Humans,” Kristin Flyntz, www.gratefulweb.com/articles/imagined-letter-covid-19-humans
Websites
Zapsplat, www.zapsplat.com/
Pexels: Videos, www.pexels.com/videos/
Books
Essays on the Essay Film. Eds. Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan. Columbia University Press, 2017.
The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia. Eds. Elizabeth A. Papazian & Caroline Eades. Wallflower Press, 2016.
How the Essay Film Thinks. Laura Rascaroli. Oxford University Press, 2017.
The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker. Timothy Corrigan. Oxford University Press. 2011.
