Growing up surrounded by multiple different cultures can be just as unique as it is isolating. However, a recent family trip to Las Vegas has helped facilitate a bit of a perspective shift. In this short personal video essay utilizing various forms of montage, with multimedia from various different sources incorporated, we will explore the concept of spatial and cultural liminality.

https://youtu.be/dBVecrmV1K8

View here!

My plan is to make a video essay discussing the way in which my family’s blended cultural heritage leads to a unique celebration of holidays. I’ll be leaving for a religious holiday this week and plan to get as much b-roll for it as I can, and I also hope to incorporate interviews with both of my parents regarding their feelings about culture and holidays, utilizing various elements of film composition that we have learned about thus far. Depending on what I’m able to record for b-roll, I may or may not also turn to AI to fill in the gaps should the need arise.

I couldn’t successfully upload the files as a webpage due to an FTP server issue, so I recorded the user experience from my own computer to get a sense for how it’s designed to play out on someone’s screen.

Data spaces, in computation, are defined by Wikipedia as “an abstraction in data management that aim to overcome some of the problems encountered in data integration system”. In the context of Bill Viola’s piece “Will There Be Condominiums in Dataspace?”, the term takes on an additional meaning: data, be it media or information, that remains fluidly influenced by the shape of its environment. Put simply, that we will begin to see an increased interactivity in the media we engage with as our new hyper-digital data space becomes more affording of audience engagement. In Viola’s words: “Soon, the way we approach making films and videotapes will drastically change. The notion of a “master” edit and “original” footage will disappear. Editing will become the writing of a software program that will tell the computer how to arrange (i.e., shot order, cuts, dissolves, wipes, etc.) the information on the disc, playing it back in the specified sequence in real time or allowing the viewer to intervene”.

While Bandersnatch is not the purest ideal of what Viola’s work preaches, it comes very close to achieving it. Strictly speaking, Bandersnatch does already exist in a pre-existing form. “Fixed in time”, as Viola puts it. It has already been filmed, produced, and programmed to react in certain ways. Like with all CYOA media, there is a certain degree of pre-determinism even in a narrative where you can “choose your own adventure”. Although you get to choose the path, the optional paths and their consequences have already been designed long before you ever touched it. However, it does still hold true to the principle of Viola’s vision by allowing the story to change and evolve in tandem with the audience’s participation, the information and story itself shaped by its relationship to the viewer. As such, no two viewers will have the exact same experience.

The logical progression of this technology would be to omit the limitations of the CYOA genre and allow for stories to tell themselves – that is, to find a way that the same story can be infinitely edited and changed by the one experiencing it. The closest approximation to this would be NovelAI, an AI writing assistant that writes the story alongside you, and changes its future prompt fulfillment based on edits and additions you’ve made. Fluid, endlessly changing media that is relentlessly shaped and reshaped by your contributions to it – the TTRPG of the digital age, in a way. If such a thing were to be implemented as a new form of media, CYOA-based storytelling could be elevated from simply choosing your adventure to collaboratively helping to create it.

For a long while, video essays have been one of my favorite types of media to engage with. It’s fascinating to listen to someone discuss a topic that interests them, while taking full advantage of the affordances the multimedia format of video grants in order to make their case more compelling. Over time I’ve begun to notice that one genre in particular that often overlaps with video essays is that of media review and critique. You might see hours-long video essays dissecting the plot, production, and themes of some obscure TV show, or the investigation into a piece of lost media, or something of that effect. This intersection is what I’m especially interested in.

Two months ago, YouTuber Hbomberguy took the internet by storm with a viral 3-hour video essay titled “Plagiarism and You(Tube)”. In this video he analyzes the culture of plagiarism and intellectual property theft that has been cultivated on platforms such as YouTube, and ended up exposing a handful of other big-named content creators in the process. On top of it garnering 17 million views at the time of writing this, it also produced a lot of memes and internet discussion around the subjects discussed.

I’ve been an enjoyer of Hbomberguy’s work for a while now, and this video is no different. Ultimately, I think what makes his video essays so consistently successful is that they’re 1) they’re well-researched, and utilizes the source material effectively; 2) formatted in a cohesive way that allows the viewer to easily follow along by establishing a clear continuity of ideas; 3) has a generous helping of jokes and humor to keep the viewer interested; 4) maintains an easily digestible pace that allows the video to be academic but not boring; and 5) he takes full advantage of the multimedia format to tell a story, using pictures, video, graphic effects, sound design, and his own voice to fully immerse the viewer.

If I were to begin writing my own video essay, I would first want to craft an outline that can allow me to develop the script and graphics in tandem with each other. The script should be written in a way that is conducive to multimedia use, and the multimedia you collect should in some way lend itself to the script. A good video essay ideally develops both visual and script in tandem so as to make the most of its medium.

The idea I have for my AI story will be something Toy Story-inspired, with the intent to follow a sort of Pixar-adjacent aesthetic and tone. In particular, those silent Pixar short films that don’t have any dialogue but instead conveys everything using vivid, emotive imagery.

The basic synopsis is that a stuffed animal has fallen off the bed and is trying to get back up again. When he first falls, another stuffed animal offers to help him back up, but he confidently turns them down. He first tries to climb up the blanket, but ends up slipping off. Then he positions a toy car at the base of the bed and uses that to help him jump, but just falls short. Lastly he climbs up onto a nearby chair and attempts to jump from the chair onto the bed, only to fall harshly onto the floor once more. He lays there after the hard fall, and becomes incredibly disheartened by his inability to get back up on his own. Just as he loses hope, the other stuffed animal reaches down to him once again. This time, he reluctantly accepts their help, and they successfully pull him up onto the bed.

It’s fascinating how you can simulate the progression of time simply through the format in which you convey it. Comics are very different from video, but some things still hold true no matter the medium. For example, lengthening or shortening a shot can give the illusion of slower or faster time, just by increasing or decreasing the focus or even simply changing the dimensions of that focus.

As someone who enjoys creative writing, this is a practice conveyed in the written form too. In order to simulate pacing or progression of time, you can enhance or detract focus on something. If I spend two paragraphs talking about the ticking of a clock within the span of a minute, that minute will feel a lot longer than if I only wrote “a minute passed”.

The reason for this is that by affecting the pacing at which our audience perceives a narrative, we are able to control their perspective on the passage of time within that narrative itself. McCloud discusses numerous ways to achieve that effect – adjusting the dimensions of a panel, adjusting the gutter, arranging the placement of dialogue or lack thereof, the actions and detail of a sequence, and the detail at which that sequence is articulated. And although a film doesn’t have things like panels and gutters, we do have frames, shots, sound design, and other such audio-visual effects at our disposal to emphasize the level of focus and attention brought to a specific moment in time.

The 1928 silent film “Autumn Mists” by Kirsanoff Dimitri excellently utilizes montage to convey thought and emotion. By centering the story and visuals on that of a singular character and editing everything to revolve around in some way, the woman’s thoughts and feelings embody the film wholesale – and through its editing, we learn more about her.

For instance, the beginning sequence of her staring at the fire, clutching the letter, and weeping. No dialogue or text tells us explicitly what is happening, but given the tone and emotion of the scene we can assume it is from a wayward lover of some kind. Her romantic isolation is reflected through the movie’s almost exclusive attention to her and her alone.

Furthermore, long shots of her crying face are spliced in with somber nature imagery, like rain. While there is no particular scenic correlation, we can infer a sort of emotional or thematic correlation as these chronologically discordant images come together to further enhance the melancholy of the film.

Run Lola Run is not a film that feels the need to explain itself. It pieces together a story of discordant timelines and frantic trial and error, with the erratic desperation of its titular protagonist being exemplified through a feverish montage alternating between video and still image, color and B&W, animation and film. The movie is too fast to sit down and explain things to its audience — namely, why and how Lola has these abilities — and trusts the audience to piece things together on their own. It gives you just enough information to piece together what’s happening on your own without detracting from its breakneck pacing, and it is thanks to its unusual discontinuous style.

Run Lola Run keeps discontinuous imagery anchored to a strong narrative momentum by ensuring that the subject matter is always consistent, never explicitly explaining the connection between images but giving enough context clues to help them make accurate assumptions. For example, in the first running sequence, when Lola is in her room trying to figure out how she’s going to get the money to Manni, we hear her internal monologue list off a few names. Between each names, a still shot of a seemingly random person briefly flashes on screen. Given the story that’s being told, we can easily assume that these images reflect the person she is thinking of.

There are numerous other instances of this throughout the story, with some kind of visual cue or focal point allowing a seamless transition between continuities. When the TV cartoon transitions into main story, we are able to understand that this is just an alternatively styled presentation of Lola running by virtue of the extremely distinctive nature of her appearance (bright red hair, teal pants). This allows us to quickly understand the transition without confusion.

However, the most memorable way in which visual similarities are used to aid in the forward momentum of the story is how the phone acts as a focal point through which timelines shift. The first run ends with a close-up of Lola with her red hair, staring up at the red bag flying above her, spliced in with rapid cuts to the falling of the red phone. The color of the objects as well as the downward motion of the latter two creates a visual connection that allows for yet another seamless transition.

For this entire movie, she had been in a constantly restless state of movement. The one time she slows down and stops, because she has passed away, her stillness is juxtaposed against the falling motion of the bag and the phone. The moment the phone falls and stops moving, she has returned to the past and resumed movement once more.

The movie does not stop to tell you that time travel is occurring. It first establishes that something unnatural is occurring with Lola speaking post-mortem, and then establishing a connection between the falling of the bag and the falling of the phone. Once those visuals have been adequately connected, the story fully pulls you back into the past and begins the next loop. It never stops to explain what has happened or why, but through visuals alone allows you to infer for yourself that she has been brought back to a sort of “save point” so she can try again.

Like its protagonist, Run Lola Run is a fast movie that is too busy to explain things to the audience, instead bringing you along for the ride and trusting that you will be smart enough to piece things together for yourself. Its experimental style perfectly complements this narrative decision, using abstract imagery and discontinuous editing to tell a story that uses the similarity and connectedness of its visual cues to help you follow along.

Hello World! My name is Mailei, and I’m a senior in the DTC program! I’m excited to get to know you all throughout this course 🙂