Some thoughts on the final project

Well, DMAC is over and this is the part where I reflect I suppose. Right now I don’t think I am in a good place to talk about what I have learned. I wanted to write some quick notes about “An ‘A’ Word Production” since people already seem to be responding to it. I’m exhausted a) from being away from home for so long (3 weeks) and b) from Jack Keuroac-like multimodal composing in the last three days the DRAFT you see down there is not finished as I didn’t have time to compile it properly in iMovie, thus the edges of the screen being cut off. All total, I produced for that one script a five page single space texty-text, an excel storyboard/shooting script/organization document, over 90 sound clips that got cut down to one long one, then edited countless times, many of those had multiple “takes” on them so I would conservatively put the number of takes over 200, fiver different versions of the animations in keynote that end up with 58 images taken by me or on the internets on 135 slides worked on in five different programs, six if you count the flash debacle, all in the last three days (maybe four? I can’t remember when I started on the essay bit but I wrote most of it Friday night). Honestly, I was rather pissed at the lack of polish the piece had but it was very well received DMAC crowd and honestly that really surprised me.
I’ll write more about this later, but I was shooting for a sort of transparent starkness and simplicity with the visuals that would allow for overlaps and deviations with the audio track. I followed the design of a demi-popular game reviewer’s style which I have always found hysterical so fans of The Escapist’s Zero Production will see that workand form here but I the rhetorical work I was trying to do was much more focused by watching George Wolfe’s The Colored Museum the weekend before last. That production was able to tackle identity and racism with both gravitas and humor at the same time so that uncomfortableness, seriousness, and laughter happen at the same time in the piece and try and make that happen for the audience. I think the work might pull that off, for which I am very . . . still really surprised and pleasantly so.
I’ve really enjoyed OSU’s faculty, gradstudents, and staff and many of the people I met here at DMAC. Again, I’ll have some stuff on the whole two weeks but right now I’m going to log and do a shout out to folks that are being kind enough to respond here.