tishaturk | In Media Res: Vids and Visual Storytelling

In Media Res has just hosted a week's worth of posts about vids and visual storytelling; I got to write about

obsessive24's Friday Night Lights vid "New Slang." If you haven't seen the vid, I highly recommend it whether or not you've seen the show; it's a master class in storytelling.

In case you're interested, here are the rest of the week's posts:

Mafalda Stasi writes about Diana Williams' "So Damn Hot" (From Eroica With Love) here

francescacoppa writes about lim's "Mission Report" (SGA) here

Julie Levin Russo writes about beccatoria's "Moon vs. Sun" and chaila43's "Order in the Sound" (BSG) here

Kristina Busse writes about Ash48's "At the Movies" (Supernatural) here

I had real trouble picking a vid to write about; there are so many wonderful narrative vids! And I had even more trouble keeping myself to ~350 words; I could do a whole

vid_commentary post about "New Slang" or any of the other vids I was considering.

One of the things I was thinking about as I wrote was the argument I've made before that "the extent to which a song is a narrative by itself is one of the things that most strongly affects our perception of narrative as a vid genre: if the song tells a story, that helps us (forces us?) to interpret the images as a story." I still think this is true, but "New Slang" reminds me that there are exceptions to nearly any generalization about vidding. As I said in the IMR post, I don't think the lyrics of "New Slang" are doing very much narrative work at all; it's all in the visuals and in the way

obsessive24 uses the song's musical structure. It helps to know the show, of course, but as I rewatched the vid I was struck by how much of the careful establishing work from the show--who these characters are, what their relationships are--is borrowed and condensed in the vid in a way that makes it really easy to follow. I think it helps, too, that this is fundamentally a relationship vid; we're all sufficiently trained in the visual conventions of representing relationships that those elements of the vid are relatively easy to parse.