Composer’s Letter:
For my digital story, I was originally going to go the personal route, and tell the story of how a younger me felt lost in her sense of identity due to not being able to see myself in my role model’s shoes. After drafting my story, I figured it would be more appropriate to just discuss the social issue as a whole. After all, there are many kids who were just like me struggle with the same identity issues, and now that I am older I can imagine a clear path to fix this issue completely, and at the same time help better our community of diverse media lovers as a whole. I settled on the social topic of the power and influence of representation, especially in youth.
Taking this personal idea and expanding it into a social issue themed project was simple because it’s my job to send the same message to our companies viewers and make sure they have a place where they feel comfortable being themselves. I think that this social issue as a whole is easy for me to express because it relates to me personally, and I also feel like it’s my right to share this with people like me.
Although talking about this topic is cake for me to talk about, doing a “digital story” was kind of a challenge for me. For our previous two projects, where we focused on either sound or visuals, I was able to do the project with minimal indecisiveness. Now that all three elements are being used (picture, sound, words), I have to decide what points deserve audio and what points deserve pictures to best get my message across to the audience. It was this aspect that I struggled with most on this project. My final draft, in my opinion gets my message across fairly easily and with emotion.
Boboltz, Sara, and Kimberly Yam. “Why On-Screen Representation Actually Matters.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 24 Feb. 2017, www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-on-screen-representation- matters_us_58aeae96e4b01406012fe49d.
“Lupita Nyong’o on Why Representation Matters.” Kiss FM UK, 8 Feb. 2018.
