Jhonny Solano
Professor Julia Brown
FIQWS 10113
As I first heard what this project was, it suddenly reminded me of a similar project I did in my high school AP English Language and Composition class. It made me think what a digital storytelling is which is informing the viewers your story using media expressing different kinds of feeling and emotions. As of the first day we were assigned this project I had been thinking about the perfect story to use. Many things occurred in my life, good things and bad things. I’ve finally decided to talk about my life especially what made me become the person I am today; my identity. I used photos that describe things or people that are a part of my life. Things from the past that basically impacted my life till this day. I also picked out images from google that relate to what I said in the story. I believe I picked the right pictures since I carefully read over my recording a lot of times in order to match the images the best I can so it can make sense when looking over the final piece. Since my essay was about my identity and a brief story about the things that make me, I will say that everything is truthful as well as the images being based on the story. As I was thinking about the recording and my voice, I decided to not use music because I felt that I didn’t need it. My story on paper was one page long which met the criteria and made the video to be the appropriate amount since the digital story came out to be three minutes long. All my images were appropriate for this project because making it perfect was the goal in order to tell my story properly. The narration matched every image well as I carefully put the images that connect to a part in the story the right way. For example, when I talked about a being in the airport and coming out of a plane, I put images that correspond to that specific situation. When I first started making up the story and writing the essay, I had a feeling that my draft was pretty good and the feedback I got helped me a lot because it gave me a good thought of what photographs to use. If I will be using photographs’ that create a fiction or photogrphs that connect to the reality. This helped me pick out the images I will use and shape my digital story video. The feedback also helped me organize my essay so at the end I can connect everything together to one big theme. While writing my essay I discovered the need to be descriptive and to organize them not just have ideas mixed up in the story. At first it was difficult to connect every word together in the story to make everything in order the way it should be so that overall the pictures I finally agree on to use make sense. I didn’t manage my time one hundred percent good because after the draft I didn’t use all the time wisely because I had put less time on the video. I then realized that everything should be perfect so I got back to doing the project and checking everything was the way it should go such as the recording and picking out all the good images. Overall coming back to the photographs, I also used some pictures I had brought up in Professor Handy’s class because it connected to the story I was using in this project. I used full body portraits of my family and an important event that happened in my senior year in high school. The photographs were successful as the video came out to be good the way I wanted it to be because this concept I used in the project was important to me since it shows what my life is all about. In this project I believe I did good overall but since it was my fault that I turned in the video later than the due date, I didn’t get the grade I wish I got. That makes me think that I should definitely manage my time better in order to receive a better grade but otherwise the video came out the way I wanted it to be.
