In this project, I made a video essay telling the story of exploring the concept of time and its measurement, and the process of making an irregular clock.
Reading Reflection:
The reading material Visual Narrative Structure by Neil Cohen talked about the basic narrative kinds and their structures. When reading 2D narratives, human’s brains transform symbolic images to certain meanings and find connections between them. By putting information fragments together, we understand sequential images, comics, and films. The similarity between different narrative theories is that they have a similar structure: Orienter-Establisher-Initial-Prolongation-Peak-Release. Among them, the most important three functional roles are peak, initial, and release. Peak usually presents in the end of a sequence. While Initial “initiates the primary event of the sequence”, release wraps up the event. Establisher provides background information, and a prolongation that usually happens after an initial describes the course of a movement. According to Neil Cohen, panels, as basic units of comics, they server as “attention units” and “narrative units”. Different ways of editing panels are used in narratives including Substitution, alteration, deletion, and reordering. Some peak panels can be substitute with action starts to increase the dramatic change in a series of sequential images and keeps the readability. Sometimes, peak panels are delated for the similar effect. The above theory can be applied to other narrative forms such as oral storytelling and movies.
The arc of narrative about this subject:
Establisher:
Introducing the project concept: (1) What is time: time is as abstract concept that doesn’t work without measurement. Different cultures have different ways to measure time. Historically units of time were defined by the movements of astronomical objects. (2) Time measurements: sun-based/moon-based.
Initial:
Showing the processing of soldering and the final work.
Peak:
Programming process.
Release:
Reappearing the final work.
Editing approaches:
In this video essay, I also used editing approaches that I learned from class:
Jump cut:
Match cut:
Process:
Changes:
After feedback in class, I added robot audio reading my project concept and introducing the codes because the contents have too much information and details that the audience couldn’t get it easily.
