A Brief History of Mine

First, Some Walk-Up Music
*A note on walk-up music.  I started making this playlist in 2016, solely for the purpose of getting myself pumped to...wait for it...get my homework done.  I know, it's hard to equate epic duels with term papers, but it helps to try.  I was never an organized baseball player, but I love to follow baseball now; it's my favorite sport.  The narrative drama, the huge data supply of statistics and science, and the summertime correlation to my river guiding career combine in a fascinating melange of art and science.  There may not be real gunfights, but there are real duels between pitcher and hitter, none more dramatic than in game 7's of a World Series.  At any rate, I'd been musing on what walkup music I'd use if I were a major league hitter or relief pitcher.  In researching, I was sorely disappointed with the choices some young whippersnappers in today's game chose--how do you get pumped up to Hip Hop?  This list was a failed attempt to help them out, but it worked for finals.  A year later, this first song in particular has become particularly poignant, as the ending of the video (if not the music) reveals a fair representation of how it feels to have a best friend facing terminal brain cancer.

I'm participating in the Boise State Writing Project this summer as a student partner.  One of the things we've been tasked to create is a ten minute autobiography.  The assignment is wide open as far as format and to a certain extent even the content.  Or at least that is how I wanted to read the instructions.  Given an inch, I'll take a mile every time.

In truth, what I ended up doing is right in line with the assignment, because the spirit of the assignment is about evolution of self.  I had, unbeknownst to me, started on this assignment over a year prior to it be assigned.  I'd taken an online class, and the professor had suggested we make a video to share as a way to introduce ourselves to our classmates.  At that point in my life, I'd seen so many "selfie" videos on Youtube and Facebook that I figured it couldn't be that hard.  Well, I'll let you be the judge. 

First Draft, Autobiography, January 2016

I hadn't watched that for a while.  While watching myself, in closeup, trying to stumble through my speech without a teleprompter is still cringe-inducing, I have to admit I am a little surprised how many seeds were planted in this first draft that bore fruit later on.  Shouldn't be surprising, as my past hasn't changed, so the ideas and themes haven't changed.  This video represents me trying to "show" you who I am by filming different "clues" around my backyard.  Lacking confidence that the viewer would have any chance of interpreting what those visual clues were, I also felt the need to "tell" as I went.  

My next attempt came the next semester.  Again, an instructor wanted to start an online class with some sort of meet and greet.  At the same time, we'd watched a short video of Sir Kenneth Robinson speaking about the state of education in America that had been animated with whiteboard drawings.  Inspired, I attempted to do the same thing, using 1970's era technology, which is to say that rather than use an animated whiteboard, I just filmed myself drawing on a regular whiteboard and then sped up the video.  (edit: actually, that would be 90's technology.  70's tech would require a chalk board and a reel-to-reel film projector.) You see some of the same themes, now spiced up with "interesting" visuals and a kickin' soundtrack courtesy of Garage Band.  Mercifully, I avoided the selfie technique this time.  More show, less tell.

Autobiography, Take 2, September 2016

Two positives and an "area for growth" on version 2:

The big positive was the "ah-ha" I discovered in the process.  You can read more about it here.  As I listed my life in timeline order, covering the high points, it struck me that a resume hits that straight-line, arrow-like order in which we hope to follow our hopes and dreams.  I was a river guide for 21 years, but because it was a summer only job, I was only on the river for a quarter to third of those years--although I do like to remember that out of those seven years, three full years of my life have been spent actually living outside next to and on a wild river.  But what did I do for the other fourteen?  Meandered through a lot of things that don't make it onto a resume.  Overlaying the exclamation point of my resume life with the question mark of the rest of my life was a paradigm shifting epiphany.

As someone who has aspired to be a film-maker, and taken at least one graded course on the subject, the film is technically sloppy.  The cuts are uneven, the music disjointed, and aesthetically, I would guess the average viewer only "gets" about half of what I was trying to show.

Still, I did try to show rather than tell, and to the astute observer, one can see evidence of both explicit and implicit attempts.  I very explicitly tell about my family on the white board, for instance, and then quickly pan across their pictures.  Implicit in the film are details about my kids, like the messy room full of Legos and the selection of books I use to elevate my "lighting," which is itself an implicit clue to those Sherlock's watching--it is a bicycle light, whatever that tells you.

The Final (for now) Cut

Growth and Groans

This is sort of what I envisioned when I pictured version two, so I am only one step behind so far.  I took the initiative to undertake the arduous task of typing out "animated whiteboard application" or something on Google, and VideoScribe is what I found.  If you can imagine it, someone else has already created an app. VideoScribe is a pretty cool program; but I wasn't sure if that was truly the direction I wanted to go this time.  Nonetheless, I started tinkering with it.  I got about a minute's worth of video (hours of experimentation in real time) and then got busy with other stuff for a few days.  That was when I realized I only had a 7 day free trial, after which my work would be saved, but locked away unless I subscribed.  Not having an immediate need to pay $30 a month, I buckled down and got this assignment "done."

The program is slick, but almost too slick, as it does stuff automatically and I never figured out how to undo or change certain things, so there are certain technical aspects I am not happy with, like zoom ins and zoom outs in certain places.  On the other hand, the program added stuff that I liked, so I'm not complaining.  For instance, I would have liked to have used different music then what they offered, but the song works, and I like the way it cycles through over and over--even though it is kind of jarring, it mirrors a thematic element I'd hoped to imply, and the musical beats came together with the visual beats with a fortuitous amount of synchronicity.

Thematically, I followed the idea I'd generated in the previous iteration:  I wanted to juxtapose the "arrow/resume" concept with the question mark/meander.  I also mixed in the Star Wars archetypes, which is a riff on an assignment from college Speech class many years ago.  In that class we were tasked to make a collage representing ourselves--How People See Me, How I See Myself, and How I Truly Am.  In this version, I used the archetypes embodied by certain Star Wars characters to portray different portions of my life:  the yearning hero, the self-absorbed adventurer, and (I aspire to) the self-less sage.

Inspired by one of the coaches, I decided to not just imply there have been meanders off the script of life, but also explicitly show a few.  I'm not sure how well this worked.  Maybe that is why we don't like to talk about failures; there are so many caveats and excuses that need to be understood...or do they?  We are a product of our mistakes as much as our triumphs; I can only smudge the lens of how people see me so much.

I discovered partway through you could add animated video GIF's, which was helpful, as the free version I was using had only a limited catalog of drawings.  I eventually learned that you can add your own drawings, if you know how to make them digitally, and render them in the correct format, neither of which I did.  At any rate, the GIF's were fun to use, although somewhat limiting as well, as I had to either use what I could find on the internet, or make my own, a process that taxed the tired memory of my aging computer.  Additionally, there is a lot of meaning embedded in the images I used, meaning that the reader may or may not share in common with me.  If you aren't familiar with that exact clip from Seinfeld, a lot of the context is lost.  Likewise with most of the other clips.  Still, that is the relationship we get as writers/creators; we want a godlike ability to pick the exact thoughts and emotions our readers will feel all the while knowing we may open the wrong box, which leads to risk-aversion and the doldrums and a lot of stifled creativity.

Speaking of rendering, working with video presents some challenges:  To create the final, published six-minute version on Youtube requires a couple of hours of rendering, where the working, editable version is converted to a simpler, read-only copy.  You can't notice a slight boo-boo in the final product and go back and fix it, without re-rendering the whole video.  If you print a long paper and discover an error or something you'd like to change, you can just reprint one page or section.  Not so with video.  Maybe that is the impetus behind so many "director's cuts" on DVD.  Anyway, combine that with the time-limitation on the free trial, and I was forced to make decisions, and live with my product.  I actually like that, as I more and more see my life as a series of snapshots anyway.  Achieving perfection is a worthy pursuit, and I can conceive this video being much more than it is, yet I can't deny the perfection of that moment when time had run out and I had to submit, or risk losing all that I had--it wasn't all that I wanted--but it never is.  

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Post-Presentation Reflection

June 26th, 2017

Technically speaking, I have to wonder about how effective it was. In light of the demonstrations and discussions we've had that touch on different learning modalities, I surmise that a few of my classmates do not have an affinity for visual learning and/or nonlinear styles, which I've discovered are two of my preferred modalities.  As such, I have meta-cognated on why I chose a visual modality to present my autobiography in mostly non-linear fashion to make a non-linear point.

Over the course of the institute, I've mentioned offhand to a couple of classmates that I've been to the South Pole, and they were surprised, which surprised me, since it was in my autobiography.  I lingered on that shot in the video for an extra beat, even though I didn't want to dwell on it.  I'm wondering if those classmates just weren't engaged to the modality, and missed it, or were trying to write notes, and missed it, or if the shot/imagery itself was confusing, i.e., "there was something about the South Pole in there, but I'm not sure what it meant..." I think I still have a lot to learn about using film as a means of communicating.  One of the hardest things with film is you watch it over and over while editing it together, and you start to feel like you are beating things over the head, when in fact you may be jumping through them too quickly.

I keep thinking of minor tweaks I'd make or add to it.  If I had (or ever have again) access to the working file, I'd add alot more of the "other" stuff around the circle, in rapid fire.  And I'd figure out a way to have a long, lingering shot at the end where the whole thing stays in focus so you can see it all and look at the various

The biggest ah-ha, however, remains the idea, reinforced above in my musings about previous versions, that my life--both future and past--is a work in progress, endlessly under revision, and intrinsically imperfect.