Rhetorical Analysis

My intention with making my rhetorical analysis a video blog was pretty straightforward. I explain most of what I sought to achieve with the video blog format in the video itself, but some elements that I didn’t mention (for length) in regards to my stylistic choices with the video had to do with the cue cards and transitions.

I decided to go with cue cards to help guide the video for their real world element. I wanted my blog to tow the line between real-world aesthetics and digital ones, as so few digital mediums can. On a blog, you are only working in the digital setting. Most of the media that is presented digitally exists solely as a digital composition, but video doesn’t. So I wanted to create a guide initially a purely digital element. So though I do have digital transitions (fading from scene to scene and words that show up onscreen, imitating a PowerPoint or Prezi format), I hoped the cue cards were just nostalgic enough to break the digital monotony and engage the viewer in the knowledge that I was physically interacting with them as well.

I did side sweeps or fades to convey a different element of same topic, with one image overtaking another. Black fade-outs were used to indicate completely new points, almost like paragraph breaks in a traditional essay. And finally I used white-out for the montage at the end to indicate that it was something completely different than what had been presented before.

I had a change of clothes when I switched to an important topic, which is one of the most interesting parts of video blogging to me. In the case of formal dress versus casual dress, I always find it fascinating how the audience reacts to the person presenting the material in a very superficial way when the creator of the material is very straightforward. Using a video trick, I did this to see the change in the audience reaction to me dressed in a hoodie in a messy room as opposed to dressed formally with make-up and jewelry in a made-up room. Would anyone have noticed if I hadn’t pointed it out?

I mention in the video that this format is very linear and I would have liked to have done something more linear than the tumblr for my remediated presentation in retrospect. Remediating my analysis to video blog actually deepened my understanding of the text more than remediating between the Prezi and the tumblr did.

Because it was a presentation, the Prezi leaned towards more curt language, less elaborating, and more participation from a physical narrator. Even though I tried to bypass the need to have an orator present by building a voice into my presentation, it was still very short and to the point.

I had more room to breathe with the tumblr post, at the cost of a sequential order. I could expand each of my points into a full blog post of its own, elaborating on the details of each bit of advice, and showing more emotion in the written text through the capitalization and punctuation techniques common on tumblr. Also, the use of gifs to convey emotion conveyed even more sentiment than just the text.

And finally, the video blog gave me the most breathing room in terms of length and elaborating (not too much breathing room, I wasn’t making a motion picture after all, just one or two video blogs). I could go on tangents and lengthy explanations (which I did) and then just edit back to a main point without having to worry about the integrity of the content.

ADDENDUM! 

After my struggles with uploading my videos to Youtube, I would like to briefly add on to my Rhetorical Analysis the pros/cons of Youtube as a media platform. Where YouTube is the most assured platform for uploading videos, it does take a long time (especially on my wifi and with my arcane computer). It allows for linking, but only to other YouTube sites, channels, and videos. But! The new format does allow similar videos to show on the side feed so you can access more of the same material at your leisure.