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.