Second Draft of Paper Intro Video

My brother and I have been discussing a slightly different approach to the "video trailer" for our research papers. We are both big fans of TED and thought it might be interesting to take that approach. TED has become increasingly popular and their tag line, "Ideas Worth Spreading" seemed to apply to what we're doing in our class. Also, just as TED talks are abbreviated versions of people's larger bodies of work (books, extensive studies, etc), our intro videos are abbreviated versions of our 10 page research papers.

This is a pretty rough draft but we think it is an approach that might be worth considering as a class. If each student prepared a 90 second presentation on their paper and presented in an auditorium setting we could place those videos all together on one webpage and then include links to the individual papers.

Love's Labor's Lost Response

We've been studying Love's Labor's Lost as a class and were assigned to attend BYU's production of the play. I am not a regular play goer so my opinions regarding the play aren't really informed by much. In other words, take this all for what it's worth.
The play is an adaptation of Shakespeare's original work, the most fundamental change being the setting. BYU's production set the play in the 1940s at an Allied Forces Canteen. The dialogue, however, was left untouched. Now I realize that this is a fairly common convention with Shakespeare adaptations but for this play it ended up just being distracting to me. Everything we were seeing was 1940's war era but everything we were hearing was Elizabethan English. Maybe I'm just not accustomed to this convention, that's very possible. But it didn't work for me.
That being said, I think most of the acting was really well done. I thought the guy who played Costard was really entertaining. In this adaptation, Costard is a sailor but he is plenty goofy and pretty funny.

Market Research: The Video Essay

As mentioned in previous posts, I have been working on developing the "video essay" for about a year and a half now. Although I always assumed someone else, somewhere else, was trying similar things, I hadn't found anything else out there. Until last week.

Dr. Pat Madden has been working as my mentor on this project and in a conversation with him last week he mentioned knowing something about a guy named John Bresland doing something similar. We looked him up and found that he has a website with a number video essays on it.

In addition to the videos, there was a link to an essay he wrote called, "On the Origin of the Video Essay" that was published in 2010 and explains the new genre. As I read it I couldn't believe how closely his thinking matched my own. Although I will admit I kind of liked the idea of being something of a pioneer with this new genre, I was really excited to see that he had already done so much with the same idea. In his short bio on the page it says that in 2013, the University of Chicago Press will be publishing a book, Crafting the Video Essay, co-authored by Bresland and Marilyn Freeman. The bio also mentions that he has had video essays published through Ninth Letter, Blackbird, and Fourth Genre which is great news because until now I wasn't aware of any literary journals that accepted video essay submissions.

Draft of Collaborative Video

Because my brother Josh and I have decided to work together on our creative project we also decided to work together on the video introduction we are doing as a class. It was a bit of a struggle for us but we at least got a rough draft completed.

A Briefer Explanation of My Idea

I discussed this idea in this post but my explanation became so long that I felt like the heart of it got buried. Plus, I didn't initially include links. So again, very briefly, I am looking at taking my research paper and making a short film from it. In order to do this well I plan on first changing the research paper into a more entertaining medium (a personal essay) and then adapting that into a video essay.

In other words: Academic Essay --> Personal Essay --> Video Essay.

I already have experience going from Step 1 to Step 2 with one essay and from Step 2 to Step 3* with another so now the challenge is going through all 3 steps with a single essay.

*This is a temporary link until it is up on BYU's site

Brainstorming with My Peeps

Josh and Cortnie both wrote on topics that overlapped mine so I read through their papers to not only get some ideas for my own ongoing project but also to hopefully be able to help them with theirs. I left comments on each of their posts (they can be accessed through the links provided above) but have copy and pasted them here as well:

Josh:
I'm thinking we should collaborate on the next phase of this project. As I was reading through your paper I just kept thinking that so much of your argument would back mine up and vice versa. I'm thinking that I'm going to try to go the academic essay --> personal essay --> video essay route that I explained in my post. I think we could do that together by combining ideas from both of our academic essays into one personal essay that could then be turned into a video essay. It will take some work but let's get brainstorming.

Cortnie:

You mentioned that the idea of creating your own piece of fanfiction for Shakespeare was silly and I disagree. To me that seems like a very fitting direction to take this. In your paper you argue for fanfiction's relevance and I can't think of a better way to back up your claims than to create some Shakespeare fanfiction and then maybe include some commentary on the ways that it has opened the original work up to you. It seems you were talking about fanfiction as a sort of stepping stone to professional adaptations and/or academic responses and I think it would be cool to see you go through that process and document it along the way. Maybe you could include a running commentary with your fanfiction piece that explains the new insights you are gaining about the play.

Final Draft and Beyond

I finally completed my research paper (which can be accessed through this link). I met with Dr. Burton to discuss the paper but also to consider potential for adapting this paper into a different medium in order to make an impact on a desired audience. Because my paper dealt directly with the power of film as a narrative medium we brainstormed briefly on ways to incorporate the ideas in my paper into a medium that would utilize some of those same audio and visual components. In a sense you could say we discussed the possibilities of adapting my research paper into some sort of short film or other visual medium. While it may initially seem like a big leap to consider adapting an academic paper into this type of medium (without just putting everyone who might watch it to sleep), I realized that some of my past and current experience may already be narrowing that gap.

Last semester I took a Lit Theory course from Dr. Billy Hall. For my final paper I decided to argue against Hegel's end of art thesis by claiming that the personal essay serves as an example of how art still fulfills the need in society that Hegel claimed we had moved away from. I was struggling to write the paper in a way that I was satisfied with and after some discussion with Dr. Hall he suggested that instead of writing the paper in the traditional academic mode, I instead write a creative nonfiction piece to make my point--in other words, he allowed me to write a personal essay to defend the personal essay against Hegel's argument. In many ways this was more difficult than the traditional approach because he still required that I include the same level of research and analysis of Hegel's theories. It took some work to incorporate such dense subject matter in a conversational and engaging voice (You can read it and decide if I pulled it off). After talking with Dr. Burton I realized that this experience may work as something of a stepping stone to a project I am currently working on.

I am working with Pat Madden (a very accomplished essayist who teaches here at BYU) on taking short creative nonfiction pieces and making short film versions of them. We recently received an ORCA grant to help fund the project and have teamed up with Inscape (BYU's creative writing journal) as a publication venue so I am really excited about it. The basic idea fueling the project is that adding images and music to a narrated version of the essay allows for a more powerful experience than simply reading the text can offer. I have created two of these "video essays" and, as is the case with any experiment, the experience has been interesting, frustrating and extremely educational. (both videos will be published through Inscape in the next couple weeks so I will also include links to those)

I still don't know exactly how it would all work out but I guess the gap between academic essay and short film isn't as big as I originally thought. I plan on looking into ways to first transform my paper into a creative nonfiction piece and then move from there to considering how to make it into a video essay. One of the major things I've learned from making the first two videos is that brevity is crucial. The second video is based on an essay that is about 1700 words long and even after cutting major pieces of text the video is eight minutes long. I'd say the target word range is around 1000 words which equates roughly to four double spaced pages. So getting from a ten page research paper to a four page personal essay without losing essential ideas is going to be a challenge. And then making that into a video essay is when the real challenges start.

Another Round of Social Proof

I had a really hard time figuring how to structure my argument for this paper and ended up writing three completely different versions of the first couple pages. The basic question I was hoping to answer--why is Shakespeare still so relevant in contemporary film?--stayed the same but my approach in answering that question varied quite a bit in each of these drafts.

For my final draft I decided to incorporate a comparison with Christopher Nolan's film Inception. That film deals with many of the same Jungian concepts I was already planning on addressing in my argument so it wasn't as radical a change as it might seem.

I spoke with Ellie and Josh (who are both in our class) about my new approach and proposed outline and they both gave me really good feedback. It was nice to get their opinion because I have discussed my paper from the beginning with each of them so they had a good idea of the full development of my idea.

In addition, I thought it would be helpful to get some feedback from someone who hadn't seen any of my previous attempts. I work at BYU's Writing Center so I brought in my first couple pages and got feedback from a few of my fellow tutors. This was extremely helpful because they all expressed interest in the topic and said they thought it was a great approach. It was nice to get a last vote of confidence from multiple people before I spent hours writing the full draft of the paper.