Video Story Tell-All

My video story was inspired by a real event that took place in my life regarding one of my close friends. I had written a poem about this event for my high school English class. At the time, I did not reveal the actual meaning behind this poem, with respect for my friend, being that my friend went to that high school. I just let people believe that it was just concerned with an overall world view of one's purpose in life. Then in college, I was enrolled in a class called Creative Non-Fiction. For this class, I had an assignment to come up with a segmented piece of writing. This assignment gave me the idea to find that poem I had written in high school and to break it down with the written story of my thoughts during this time, in between each stanza of the poem. So that is what I did. Then for this Digital Storytelling class that I am currently enrolled in, I turned this new piece of writing into a visual, a video story to be exact. The words of the pieces of the poem, broken down by stanza, scroll on the screen in silence scattered throughout the video. In between stanzas I used my voice-over of reading the descriptive parts of my thoughts during this event. Occasionally throughout the narration, I added sound effects under my voice that went with what I was talking about at the moment. For example, I used hallway ambience noise, laughter, thundering rolling, and a brief part of a song. This added an extra element for the audience to relate to my feelings at the time. I also used some slow motion video shots. Overall, I was happy with the result of my video story, though there are a couple parts of it that I feel like I could've improved, had I had more access to certain places or people to film.