Reflections on first Video Project

Audience& Message Objective

Audience
Once I’ve earned my PhD in Media Psychology, I plan to launch a business specializing in media-oriented mind-body education programs and services. The brief video autobiography assignment I’ll be reflecting on here, Ready for Take Off, provided an opportunity to pilot one approach I might use to introduce myself to potential business investors.

Message Objective
I had two primary goals for this digital story project. First, I wanted to set an intimate personal tone, to connect with viewers in a heartfelt sense. This is not a traditional approach to selling a business, but the intention here is more to deliver a sense of my character strengths and values. Second, I wanted to leave viewers curious about what my business vision and model is; sufficiently enough to compel them to screen the second video I make for the Digital Storytelling class, which will address the founding principles of the proposed venture.
Physical vibrancy, creative expression, developmental influences of media, and health education are mainstays of my autobiographical story. It is a tale of recovering, celebrating, and sharing my truest, most exciting sense of life at its best.

Setting intimate personal tone.
By telling about my personal and professional development in an open fashion, using original artwork and presenting some key developmental conflicts, I intended to offer a genuine glimpse at my motivation for, and commitment to, creating a purposeful life through fostering creativity and deep understanding of sensorimotor experience in a media rich world.
I felt rather vulnerable including my paintings and drawings, as they don’t typify high production values. Still, they were true personal expressions from various points in my life that demonstrated an appreciation for creative voice, human striving, social connection and a will to meaning (Frankl, 1984). These elements of my life story are dear to me and represent intrinsic values most humans cherish. High production values or not, the images and story together, for the most part, have strong potential to resonate with others.

Creating curiosity about the business.
The strategy I relied on to support second goal was similar to that of the first. I wanted to invoke a feeling of seeking, to conjure association with the quest to recognize and honor one’s authentic voice, agency, and communion within an increasingly technologically managed world. Pursuing such a process of inquiry, discovery, and engagement are not only important to me personally, it is a fundamental pillar of the business mission.
The production thinking was that if I sufficiently engaged the viewer on an emotional level, and piqued their interest through my professional background in media and healthcare, they would want to screen the second piece I will be producing for the DST course in which, as noted above, I plan to present key points supporting the business mission.
I see in retrospect, however, with the benefit of Dr. Ohler’s post-production critique, that I could have more effectively raised curiosity about the venture by specifically stating the philosophy that is driving my business vision.

Story Construction

Rationale for Retrospective Span
I chose a broad retrospective approach rather than focusing only on my professional life, even though it might be argued that business investors want to know about the history, and future likeliness, of professional success. The rationale was that my vision for the business is inspired by the totality of my life cycle development. If I could succeed in parlaying that spectrum into a moving story, I may be better set to sell a business idea that is somewhat unconventional.
The great challenge of a life cycle retrospective was to adequately synthesize the story elements in a simple and engaging fashion. Wrangling with complexity has long been a distraction for me. Creating a Visual Portrait of a Story (Ohler, 2008) was a great help in this managing the challenge. A traditional chronological linear structure helped me to represent development in stages, or phases. In addition, Ready for Take-off was easily mapped according to Ken Adams’ 1990 progressive Story Spine (as referenced by Ohler, p. 121). The transformation that occurs in Ready for Take-Off is the moral of the story: integration of body, mind and media fuels positive social construction. On the personal level, we see this coalescing in a return to self; the victory over the past manifests as the synthesis of the vibrant child, the disciplined mind, and the feeling heart applied to generative aims in a hyper stimulated world.

Relevance of my Personal Development as a Prelude to the Business Concept
I wanted to present some of the most formative and demonstrative points in my life to paint a portrait of what has brought me to where I am today. By doing this, I intended to provide insight into what has made me sensitive and strong, dynamic and steady, and what has compelled me to keep moving forward. I took great care in selecting a mix of intimate detail and personal achievements that would suggest strong business leadership qualities along with commitment to social compassion. Drawing threads from across the lifespan worked rather well in weaving the whole.
Twenty years of work as a touch therapist clearly suggests the strong significance of my earliest (infant) experience and my particular sensitivity to matters of trust, attunement, and intimacy. My exploration of gravity in early childhood and in school age attests to my natural proclivity to actively investigate sensorimotor issues and incorporate that curiosity in industrious endeavors. School and career choices in adolescence and adulthood tell of my appreciation for both the natural and man made world and my need to integrate them in a socially generative way as I reach mature age (Erikson, 1994).

Social subtext: agency and intimacy are essential for achieving generativity.
From a psychosocial development perspective, achievement of emerging adult agency and young adult intimacy are imperative for generativity to occur (McAdams, 1993). Largely influenced by the initial sensory stage, where trust and touch are crucial to secure attachment formation and the establishment of narrative tone, connecting with others in intimate relationships can be especially challenging in a fast-paced, highly stimulating environments in which media often deliberately manufacture emotional intensity (Luskin, 2002). In such an environment, accurate empathy can be compromised (Goleman, 2006). Our current convergence cultural may offer high opportunity to be active rather than passive through increasingly interactive and participatory media communities (Jenkins, 2006), but the transcendence of distance through media communication does not account for the disruption of physical attunement in social relationships and what quality of intimacy may be at stake in such social adaptation. If accommodation of media saturation results in social fragmentation and superficial relationships, is intimacy achievement more likely to fail; are there consequences for social generativity? Widespread evidence of superficial relationships (Gergen, 2000) and narcissism suggest there may be.
According to Caldwell (1996), we can find our way back to our most authentic, creative and willfully constructed selves through exploration of how we move and experience our bodies. As a matter of the primary technology of the body, recovering healthy self-awareness and capacity for high-functioning self-regulation is what D.H. Johnson (1992) describes as technology of authenticity rather than a technology of alienation. Authenticity is a kind of intimacy, an indicator of embodied cognition and productive engagement with the world. It fosters development rather than default identity or foreclosure, and retains the juice of agentic being to, together, cause generativity.
I wanted to use Ready for Take-Off as a prelude to the story of my business model, one that aims to cultivate generative capacity of individuals and organizations. As an expression of what I wish to contribute to society, the business endeavor intends to nurture the freedom ‘to fly’ in one’s life and as a society, to push the exhilaration of fully, genuinely embodied experience. This suggests the liberation of creative expression, personal fulfillment, and construction of healthy social solutions.
In fair measure, I think I did succeed in moving toward that goal with the production of my first digital story in this course.

Technical Reflections
To reiterate what I’d expressed in a personal communiqué with my professor, there were a few edit transitions I couldn't get quite how I wanted, and I was not pleased with the photography of some of my artwork. My scanner went on the fritz and I had not been able to replace it. I also would like to have rewritten the section of narrative about my first film in 6th grade; after I was well into production it began to feel a bit heavy handed. However, I had already put together the clips and stills and felt that the extra time to revise (and potential for unexpected complications) didn't warrant it. The other thing I would have liked to have known/done is to make color computer graphics for the basic communications model and the ending graphic/Venn diagram. Also, I could not figure out, try as I might, how to change the color and font size of the title graphic. Each attempt (about 5 or 6) wound up cutting the main background image of the little girl watching the bird.

Personal Insight
In the process of reflecting on this production, I came to find the real pearl: I am on a ridge looking forward to the expansive future ahead of me, a return to my creatively vital self. I don’t have to seek or sustain unfulfilling creative fantasy bonds (Firestone, Firestone & Catlett, 2006). I hadn’t seen this before. As simple as it sounds, I need to nourish my own creative voice, and not forsake it. And if what I have to express doesn’t land where or how I expected it would, I know that I’ve tried in earnest to connect, to be honest, to share my heart with the world. The new critical skills I gained by completing this project will certainly help in further crafting successful presentations.

References

Caldwell, C. (1996). Getting our bodies back. Boston: Shambala.

Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what happens. San Diego: Harcourt.

Erikson, E. H. (1994). Identity and the life cycle. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Inc.

Firestone, R. W., Firestone, L. & Catlett, J. (2006), Eds. Sex and love in intimate relationships. Firestone, et al., Fantasy bond, voice process, death anxiety.
(pp. 135-169). Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Association. vii, 338 pp.

Frankl, V. (1984). Man's search for meaning. New York: Pocket Books.

Gergen, K. (2000). The saturated self (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books.

Goleman, D. (2006). Social intelligence: The revolutionary new science of human relationships. NY: Bantam.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture. NY: New York University Press.

Johnson, D. H. (1992). Body: Recovering our sensual wisdom. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

Luskin, B. J. (2002). Casting the net over global learning (1st ed.). Irvine, CA: Griffin Publishing Group.

McAdams, D. P. (1993). The stories we live by. New York: Guilford Press.

Ohler, J. (2008). Digital storytelling in the classroom: New media pathways to literacy, learning, and creativity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press/Sage