Interview reflection
1. What is the essential story behind the piece you created?
The story behind the piece is a mixture of my story and the story of past clients who used the experience of divorce to become stronger and help other women. The fictional character, Shari woke up one morning to the pain of finding out that her marriage was over. She kept focusing on what went wrong and couldn’t find any answers. Then she began to focus on healing herself, and that turned out to be an achievable goal. In the process she found her inner strength and a story to inspire other women to honor themselves and not be defined by a man. She learned that she could trust again, not just other people, but herself.
2. What was your purpose in creating this piece of new media narrative? Do you feel you were successful in communicating your purpose?
This piece was created as an example for my audience, motivational speakers, to see what the story portion of the speech might look like. I wrote a book about life lessons that we endure and encourage speakers to use it to anchor their speech. The purpose of the video was to use Shari ’s choice of life lesson – Trust – to tell her story as part of a motivational speech. The balance of the speech will be in another video. I feel I successfully communicated my purpose because the piece is one in a series and enables the potential speakers to visualize their own PowerPoint presentation based on the story map I created.
3. Who was your audience? Do you feel you were successful in reaching your audience?
My audience was single moms who successfully overcame the challenges of being a single parent, dealing with depression, frustration, domestic abuse and temptation to pack it all in and who were willing to share their story to motivate single moms in domestic abuse shelters. I feel I was successful in reaching my audience because I anticipated needing to coach each speaker one-on-one and to have to edit their speeches, but I didn’t do any of that. The women created powerful speeches based on my instructional videos and completing their worksheets. This was a vast improvement over the previous instructional video and worksheets I had used which left many questions in the minds of the would-be speakers.
This technique made it easy for non-writers, to write and discover they have the ability to write their story and to share it with oral narration.
The video and PowerPoint of one of the speakers is below. I have received permission from her to use it in this course to show how I’ve applied the learning tools in this course. The instructional video is found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrX1ip_3uK4
4. Why did you use your particular approach to media production and media selection? Were you successful?
I used some clip art supplemented with stock photos to make the story appear more real. The clip art and the cheesy sound effects were to make this heavy topic a little bit lighter. The music at the beginning and then end add some polish to the media piece. I wanted to make sure there was some relatable visuals such as the photo of the “Friends” cast. I used a lot of dissolves since the character experienced a dissolution of her marriage and had to dissolve past beliefs. One of the techniques I will try next time is slide transitions to emphasize the turn in the story. I may also use some audio to tie together some emotion with the visual and the narrative inflection.
5. What did you learn during the process of crafting your media piece that you can use in creating future new media narrative?
I learned the timing it takes to complete the media narrative. I was scheduling 1 hour per minute of final video. However, it is taking more like 3 hours per minute of video.
Arranging the story map table is key to organizing my time. I identified the pictures I would use, located them and then pasted them into the table. When I worked on the PowerPoint presentation, sometimes it was easier just to cut and paste the images directly from the table. Also, I could see where there were gaps in the slides and where I could move pictures around or repeat pictures. Sometimes I would start to get too wordy, and it was good to refer back to the table for guidance.
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Speaker’s PowerPoint is located on Google docs at: https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AZi5CdZ1o8j9ZGZ3d2Rrcm1fMTQ0Zzdmdng5Y2I&hl=en&authkey=CPifncMN
Video of speaker’s presentation:
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