Aaron Mayer
5/21/15
ENG 2150
Professor Blankenship
Reflective Remediation: Insights and Illusions
Using the video format, what is lost and what is gained?
For my original essay, I employed a rhetorical tactic of describing the same
event from different perspectives using different color inks. I was nervous that it
would look tacky and lessen the seriousness of the work, but it turned out to
enhance the essay. For the video, I ran with the idea and extrapolated that opening
into a debate between two characters, one in red and one in blue, to imagine a
hypothetical dialogue between the two. While the effect worked on paper, it took on
a new and distinct form in film.
An oral argument versus a written one comes with benefits and drawbacks,
but I feel that the formality of the tone in the paper was very different compared to
the tone exhibited in the video. While this was the intended effect (to imitate one’s
colloquial speech patterns), I felt at times that I was purposefully refraining from
using a word even if it were the most appropriate or precise. A huge benefit of
speaking, however, comes from its speed and fluidity. I came up with arguments
that I failed to see while writing the paper, and it’s because I was speaking aloud to a
camera that I was able to discover and include different phrases.
The filming was the easiest part. I just spoke my mind for half an hour and
recorded it. The difficulty came on the back end of the project in distilling and
editing the footage, whereas the difficulty in writing the paper came on the front end
of actually typing it. Editing a paper is very different from editing a video, though
there are fun aspects of both. For writing, the fun of editing strikes when an
unkempt clause gets shaved and showered and ends up a handsome, neat sentence.
For video, the fun of editing strikes when a clip is spliced into a perfect length and
transitioned seamlessly into the next frame. Both are laborious, intensive, and
tedious at times, but the finished product makes the effort worthwhile.
The greatest benefit of the video, however, is its imprint on the memory of
the viewer. It is a known fact that people are more likely to remember information if
that information was received through a variety of sensory inputs. Simply reading
text aloud has been correlated with dramatic increases in later-date recollection.
Watching a moving image, in tandem with the audio, in confluence with text and still
frames makes a video much more likely to be remembered.
One interesting side effect to this mnemonic benefit, however, is how it
affects duration. A lengthy paper is respected (consider: “Wow! He wrote an 83-
page dissertation on the mating habits of North Indian mollusks”) whereas a lengthy
video is seen as annoying and wears on the attention span (consider: “Ucchhh! He
made us watch an 83-minute long documentary on the mating habits of North
Indian mollusks…”). With the average attention span on the wane, videos are
expected to be snappier and contain more information per second. This is just
another pressure on the shoulders of a modern video maker.
Audience and Setting
I feel like my written essay is targeted toward a teacher or someone in an
academic setting. It’s written very formally as I’ve mentioned before, and it cites
credible and valuable sources. The video, however, is less suited for such an
environment – I would call it an entertainment piece sooner than I’d call it an
academic piece. I don’t think this is inherently due to the fact that it’s a video: plenty
of videos can be valuable resources and educational tools (watch Crash Course on
YouTube for examples), but because our modern hub of all things video is currently
YouTube, which has an expectation of entertainment value, many of these purely
educational movies must accommodate; this ultimately led to the pioneering of a
genre under the freshly coined banner “edutainment.” Though I celebrate and
encourage the birth of this new genre (I’m an avid fan of several edutaining
YouTube channels), I think it would be valuable if there were a distinction between
the daily hodgepodge of YouTube’s contents and the more academic types of video:
perhaps a “YouTube Scholar” much like Google’s platform.
Even if such a YouTube Scholar platform existed, my video would not belong
on it. A realistic setting for my video is in a hard drive tucked in the recess of my
cabinet under my sock drawer: it’s not fit for the public eye. Though I believe that
the project has potential to provide an insightful commentary on the controversy
surrounding whaling on the Faroe Islands, it’s not quite at that level to be respected
as such.
Expectations and Results
I knew that the remediation project as a whole would not be an easy
undertaking, but the commitment to iMovie was, in retrospect, asinine. Nothing
against iMovie, but it was not as intuitive as I’d hoped. I couldn’t just “jump right in”
as Apple guaranteed I would be able to, and even after hours of online tutorials, I
was fabulously ill equipped for the project I initially envisioned. I thought it would
be easy to duplicate myself on the same screen, but without green screens and
hundreds of dollars of animation software, this proved to be impossible. Perhaps I
was spoiled by the magic of studio technology and the assumption that it would be
readily available and accessible to anyone, but I seriously thought it would be easier.
I was tempted at one point to remediate entirely and go with a Prezi or a collage-
style PowerPoint, but I had already put in so much time and energy that I felt I was
closer to the end than the beginning (I was wrong when I made that estimation, but
it’s like that feeling when you’re on a line for a roller coaster and you want to give up
but you feel bad since you’ve already waited for so long). Ultimately, I think the
project was beneficial for me on several fronts: it made me a better video editor
(albeit marginally), it made me appreciate the complexity and difficulty that must be
poured into all those videos on YouTube that I take for granted, and most
importantly, it made me see the tact of using different media to express multi-
dimensional ideas. Just as a chef must select the proper knife when preparing a dish,
so too should a student select the proper medium of expression in the classroom; in
a world where the lines between media are continuously blurred and merged,
expressionists of all sorts are increasingly expected to be a jack of all trades and a
master of all. Photographers become videographers, graphic designers become
Photoshoppers, musicians become audio engineers, and so forth. Spending this
project as a foray into that world has been time well spent!