It took a while for me to figure out what I wanted to do for this assignment. The assignment description was so wide open that it was difficult to narrow my list of ideas to one that I actually wanted to do. To me it the Fireside Chat seemed similar to the remix assignment in that we were supposed to choose something about ourselves, a physical trait, a belief, a personality trait or something like that and explore that. However, the fireside added an aspect of performance that just didn’t exist in the remix and I think this performance added a lot to the assignment.
Since I couldn’t actually decide what what I wanted to talk about I decided to make something that I knew I could use as a media example first. I had seen many times before the videos on Youtube of sped-up Photoshop projects and thought that it was something that I could do and had always wanted to try. To do this, I took an old photo of myself and altered it as I had done once before to make it into a Na’vi alien from the film Avatar. I recorded the process of this using the screen recording function of Quicktime. I then sped it up in iMovie and added soft music to it that I thought sounded like a song that was gradually building to fit the visuals. I now had a piece that I could use to inspire me to wit rite the words that I would speak.
After having created this Photoshop video piece, I thought of how much different I looked at the end and thought of this in the sense of life. By that time I had read Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” which told stories about the authors childhood or earlier life. While reading this piece, I started thinking of stories that I could talk about for this assignment. I then began to think of myself when I was little because I used to try to change my appearance all the time with clothes and hair products and by other means; but now I don’t do things like that because I’ve learned and grown over the years to understand myself and the things about myself that I might not have been okay with before. This was something I felt was a good experience and belief that I could share and one that I wish everyone would know.
I crafted my performance to match the video that would be playing while I talked. I didn’t want to be extremely formal in my speaking but I didn’t want to be too colloquial either. I tried to aim for somewhere right in the middle. As I was telling the stories about me trying to change my appearance, the Photoshop video behind me was making big changes to my picture. At the end when I was getting to the more gooey part of the chat, I flipped from the completely Na’vi-ed me to the actual me to represent the coming to terms with oneself that I was talking about. It seemed to be somewhat symbolic to me and it went rather smoothly.
