Choosing a potential story for this assignment was quite challenging for me. I just really struggled to get in touch with my creative side or know what I wanted to do a story on. However, once coming up with the idea, it was quite clear to me how I wanted my visuals to look.
With my story, it is quite a difficult one to capture the story in images. The reason for this being that Jon’s dream began when he was a young boy, living in Chile. As the images couldn’t portray how his dreams began, I thought that the audio side to my assignment should tell the story and the images show him as he is today, a man who made his dream a reality. The images start with a couple very simple images of Jon sitting and smiling. I started off with these simple images as I wanted the audience to capture an image of what Jon looks like as for the majority of the rest of images in the video, he is walking to the garage. I decided to make the majority of my video of Jon walking to the car to portray the long journey he travelled to get where he is today. A marriage, 3 children, owning his own hair dressing salon and then a divorce, to finally know when the right time to purchase his dream car was.
I wanted my story to be inspirational but no music I found helped create this, so I decided to leave the majority of the video with just his voice – besides the dirt road footsteps and car being turned on. For the majority of the audio, Jon is speaking of the leading up and the story behind his dream car and this truly brings out the ‘hidden’ aspect of the story. Photos are so important to tying a story together and making it more intriguing for readers. When reading a new article online, you will notice a few images throughout the story, even with little to no explanation behind the images, they help ensure the story is brought to life.
In Week Twelve’s, Multimedia and Photojournalism Ethics, reading ‘The Ambiguity of Pressing the Shutter’, it speaks on the tragedy that the most famous photojournalists had to go through. From wars to bombings, they were there and were forced to pull out a camera and capture the moment even if they felt it be inappropriate for the sad time. Whilst reading through this fascinating article it lit something in me, photos are so powerful for capturing true and raw emotions. The images and tragic moments that were taken by photojournalists Yoshito Matsushige, David Burnett and Ketevan Kardava who are all the individuals behind some famous powerful images knew the history that they were making by capturing that moment. The emotions in the people’s faces are something that only still images will be able to truly grasp how horrible those moments were for them. Although my story is overly light-hearted compared to these photojournalists’ images, the one of Jon at the very end is of him driving his Porsche for the very first time. The happiness that he felt in that moment was captured and you can truly see it in the photo which shows the power of emotion that images portray.
In Week Nine’s, Hearing with Light, Seeing with Sound, reading ‘Mimesis and Diagesis’, “For all the tired clichés about pictures being worth a thousand words, news images do not ‘speak’ for themselves; they require this contextualising language – traditionally this context has been the privilege of the textual journalist.” I find this statement to be quite important when it comes to editing your own visual/audio piece of even simply viewing one. There are some images that speak for themselves. Nonetheless, when telling a story, it is the words that are most important in getting a message across, the images are just there for what the words cannot and should not say.
In the same reading it states; “It must be remembered that still images were the basis of early filmmaking.” This sentence really helped me make sense of this whole assignment. Animated movies, back when they first were being produced, was a large number of images all taken to produce motion-like actions and create a whole film. This shows how early on photos have been important in photojournalism and film, and although it shows a story it does not necessarily tell the story. Audio and visual are kind of like a package deal, especially when it comes to photojournalism or film.
References
Murabayashi, A, ‘The Ambiguity of Pressing the Shutter’, Ethics in Photojournalism, viewed 7 November 2020 https://zekemagazine.atavist.com/ethics#chapter-2859510
PDF from Moodle, viewed 9 November 2020
immerse into media 