Video Essay

         After taking the class and Professor Juhasz’s advice that I narrow down my proposal and only focus on one of my three proposed topics, I began to construct a project that focused only on how people interact with and what they think of outdoor advertising via billboards.  Specifically I planned to focus on how consumerism effects our relationship to billboards in that in order to see a billboard one must look up at it (the product is always looming down on us) and how seeing the full billboard is difficult because people are constantly driving quickly by, yet commercialism is still an inherent part of our daily lives.  What I noticed from the photos of billboards that I collected was that the words and pictures strategically placed on billboards each worked in different ways to create emotions in a consumer.  However although looking at only words or only pictures was interesting, I realized that no matter if the billboard was for food, a public service announcement, using a provocative model to sell clothes, or a political campaign, the main purpose of all of these billboards was to provide enough information so that a person feels good and buys something.

         After spending a day going out and taking photos of billboards I realized that having this come across in my video essay was quite boring and not very impactful so I found myself questioning how I could make my project more interesting. Going out a second day, this time driving down Sunset Blvd I was deeply affected by just how many billboards there were. There were billboards on the street, in front of people’s homes, on the freeway, on the side of buildings, shopping malls, etc. all pressuring people to buy a specific product.  I began to think about contrasting the many ways people positively interact with billboards (my friends in my interviews stated that they help them decide what to buy, that they like to support a company selling a certain product that they live, and how they just like looking at the pictures) with visual pollution and the anti-billboard movement, including culture jammers who believe that the commercialization of advertising is polluting our thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors.  The point of this video essay is not to say billboards or good or bad, but to present the many ways people interact with billboards and question why, how, and if billboards could possibly be polluting our world. If the answer is yes, then is commercialization via billboards polluting our thoughts and mannerisms, or is it merely the notion that they are just physically polluting our space.

         I started my video essay by taking the perspective of a driver who while driving around Los Angels comes into contact with many different billboard advertisements.  After defining the benefits of advertising through a mainstream media channel (a voice over from Mad Men) that explains how advertising makes you “happy,” I turned to three of my friends who I interviewed.  They explain how billboards effect the way they see the world though both its visuals and words. To offer an opposing view of advertising on billboards, I then explored how culture jammers have used distorted versions of billboards to highlight the spectacle of consumerism and its effects on our physical environment and interactions with products and one another.

         I thought this overall experience of “writing” an essay through visual means was very interesting and opened my mind up to expressing myself through new and creative visual forms. While I of course ran into issues (on Tuesday night IMovie crashed and I had a panic attack while running to the apple store to have them fix my laptop) I overall felt a much more personal connection to my subject then if I was doing research and writing a 10 page paper.  I enjoyed going out and interacting with my topic by physically being in the presence of billboards and using the camera to look at it pierce by piece (through words, visuals, interviews) in a way that I could have never interacted with in a traditional academic assignment.

Video Essay Proposal:

What is my Thesis? For my video essay, I will be looking at different characteristics that relate to how people interact with advertising on billboards. 

The idea of going out and recording billboards inspired me both because billboards are an extremely visual form of advertising and because the photos and text that appear on billboards have many layers of contextual depth.

Thesis:  My video essay will explore the idea of perspective and how there are many different ways to look at billboards that reflect a person’s relationship with consumerism. Specifically I will focus on three perspectives: a) how close-up interactions with the words and images create emotional ties to products b) how physical distance emphasizes a top-down structure which places billboards in a position of looming over the viewer, and c) how a neighborhood persona is established as billboards target certain social classes and racial groups through its messages.

What are my Supporting Materials? My supporting materials that I will use to complete this project are my digital camera, my laptop (specifically iMovie, which I will use for editing), the Internet to find audio clips via YouTube, and my friends who I will be interviewing.

What is my Structure? My videos structure will have three parts.  First, I will look at how words and images influence people by focusing on a parts-to-whole analysis of what is actually being advertised on a billboard.  When looking at billboards from up close, it is easy to become influenced by the proactive messages and to disregard the notion that the billboard is constructed to be commercial. However, with physical distance, the viewer begins to realize that billboards are designed to influence one’s decisions, even when they are not conscious of it. This notion of consciousness will be further explored in my second and third part of my video essay. Because billboards are placed above a person’s eye level, it forces the viewer to look up at them.  Unlike a TV commercial or magazine advertisement, viewers do not engage directly with the products on a billboard in that people often drive by them without a second glance.  Nonetheless, billboards continue to be a successful form of advertising. Third, I noticed that billboards are targeted to influence the specific neighborhoods they are placed in.  Billboards therefore not only influence how a singular person interacts with advertisements but influences communities as a whole as well.  In doing my preliminary recordings, I have been fascinated how billboard advertising has different effects from different perspectives.

What is my Style? In my first part, I will be looking at how advertisements make us feel emotional and nostalgic and will do this by creating a montage that looks at how the wording and pictures on billboards are designed to draw us in to buy a product, yet contrast this with the perspective of looking at billboards from a distance, in which commercialism is much more blatant. In my second part, I will be looking at the perspective of the physical distance between a person’s eye level and a billboard and try to draw a connection between how people regard and are influenced by billboards through conducting interviews.  In my third part, I will try to look at perspective from a geographical standpoint by videoing different neighborhoods to see how billboards reflect certain locations.

What is my Voice? My voice while not appearing directly on camera will be apparent by how my video essay is constructed. I will be visually manipulating words, images, and sounds, to make my point- very similar to how an advertisement on a billboard is constructed.

What is my Purpose?

My Purpose is to record the relationship between how people interact with and view billboards.  No matter if one is only looking at certain aspects of the billboard, not consciously looking while they quickly drive past a billboard, or if they regard billboards when choosing to buy something, advertisements are a huge role in one’s life and continue to influence what people say, wear, and buy.

What is my Audience? My audience is for anyone who has ever seen or has been influenced by a billboard. 

The Value of Digital Humanities

            While many people are accustomed to ask, “What are the Digital Humanities?” Lisa Spiro in “This is Why We Fight: Defining the Values of Digital Humanities” claims that there is no singular definition of the Digital Humanities.  She suggests that instead of limiting the Digital Humanities to a definable construct, we need to instead outline specific values that reflect its various goals.  In creating a values statement, the community can uphold the spirit of what distinguishes the Digital Humanities from the traditional humanities in future projects.

As our world becomes a more digital place, the main goal of Digital Humanities is to put scholarship online and to make it relevant and accessible in a digital age.  In part, the Digital Humanities asks people to think about new ways of interacting with academia.  The Digital Humanities introduces how scholarship can be personally interacted with, as the advantage of the Internet is that networks can be created in which people can exchange ideas, discuss scholarship, and build off one another’s knowledge.

In last week’s class, we spent a significant amount of time discussing “What Constitutes as Critical Visual Studies” and in our discussion, we raised points such as the methodologies needed to define academic writing vs. non-academic writing.  One of the main differences between the traditional humanities and the digital humanities are the concerns over ownership, as there are limitations in protecting one’s ideas and originality on the Internet.  The aim of the Digital Humanities is not to make traditional academia and its values obsolete, but instead to introduce new values that will allow digital forms to grow.  The Digital Humanities values fluidity and collaboration, believing that individual voices can and will contribute something new to the field. This blog for example, will express my own thoughts on my own platform, but overtime will be read and commented on by people – some in this class, some in the Digital Humanities/Visual Research field, and some who will remain anonymous, but who will all add new viewpoints that I did not think of or decide to cover.  As a whole online community, knowledge can be spread, added to, countered, and debated and this is what makes the digital humanities unique and special.

“For the Digital Humanities, information is not a commodity to be controlled but a social good to be shared and reused” (22)

As a starting point to discussion, Spiro suggests some of the values of the Digital Humanities should include: Openness, Collaboration, Collegiality and Connectedness, Diversity, and Experimentation.  A quick definition of each value as indicated by Spiro follows: Openness is the ability to maximize the free sharing of ideas. Collaboration allows people with a range of skills to contribute to digital scholarship.  Diversity enables participants of a varied age, generation, skill, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, etc. to participate. Collegiality and Connectedness promotes the notion that that texts and tools should be available for all and that publically funded research and instruction should be publically accessible. Finally, Experimentation suggests that a platform be built for not only creating and spreading knowledge, but people should experiment with transforming traditional approaches to teaching and research.

Ultimately, while concerns over authority and ownership (that promote traditional academia) are still valid and deserve to be considered, the question that needs to be asked is will something new and perhaps more comprehensive derive from using the Internet as a vehicle for communication and a distributor of knowledge?

The answer to this question will be something to explore as this class continues…