Sunday, March 6, 2016

Cartoons vs. Real Life Footage

Hey class! Brother Burton invited me to watch a column of 1-2 minute videos on the Kindea Labs website, and overall I enjoyed watching how they depicted their various ideas. Yet, the question that kept coming back to mind was, "Is the lack of footage with real human interaction helping their point get across?" I felt at times the cartooning of the videos was a great way to help me understand their view point, but I would've loved to have seen some real life results from all of their research. Along with that, here are some other more detailed things I liked/disliked about the Kindea Labs videos I watched:





- Creativity: As an audience member, I was entertained mostly by a video done by the Georgia Research Institute and the University of Minnesota. They both kept their cartooning simple and easy to follow, with helpful captions that followed the script of the narrator. Both institutions introduced pretty "far-fetched" ideas, but I think the cartoon route and simplicity of keeping it down to only a few minutes made the idea a lot easier to swallow. The vibrant colors made the ideas more agreeable and relatable, and overall left me wanting to know more.

- Content: To explain all that these Universities were trying to in the short amount of time that they were given, you were able to know quickly if their idea really held any credibility or not. A video done by the Oxford University discussed how we should change the way we punish those who are guilty of crimes, but I struggled to understand what their point was until they stated it right at the end. I think our video, however we choose to do it, should have a clearly stated thesis at the beginning and at the end so we don't lose our audience. From watching these videos I also realized how important it is that we have a good balance of academic language and more casual language.

- Overall Impression: Something that I first noticed about these videos is that their music either really helped their presentation, or it completely distracted from it. There were a few videos whose music didn't match what they were saying at all! Going back to the Oxford University video, their music was very glum and almost creepy and left me more with an eerie feeling rather than a motivation to learn more about their research. Another thing that I think most of these videos lacked in was a historical relation to verify their ideas. I don't recall many quotes from any credible sources, which in our video presentation I believe will help qualify our argument a lot. There was maybe only one or two videos that had a unique call to action, and the rest were just ideas thrown out there for the audience to chew on, but didn't really ask anything of them in the long run.

I'm excited for our class project, and as much as I liked the cartooning of these videos, it would be very beneficial to have some real footage to back up our argument. Since our topic is entirely centered on communication, putting real human examples of the different things we see wrong with modern communication, I believe, would really hit home with a lot of people.

7 comments:

  1. Could you revise your post and insert links to the videos that you mention -- at least the good examples? Or even embed them in the post if you can or want to. Thanks for going through these videos and helping to sharpen some criteria for our own attempt.

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    1. Hey Brother Burton, so for some reason it won't let me get separate links for each of these videos, but i'll put the link for the kindea labs website and they can be found that way ... is that ok?

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    2. On the lower bar of each video, hover over the "V" and then right click on it to get the URL for where the video can be found on Vimeo. Or, just go to vimeo.com and search for that video by name and get the link from there.

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  2. It seems that these were all attempts at making the information enjoyable and also interesting. Media and visuals however need a balance until they become too distracting like you said about the music.

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  3. I believe it is true that if the information is simplified too much - this happens a lot when it is animated, we lose the ability to tell whether or not something is credible.

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  4. I watched the Kindea Labs as well. I took a little different perspective on them when taking notes. I took notes separately on each video and what I liked about them (for our group project). I loved the format of these videos, because they helped advertise the college's research, studies, programs, or projects, all within about three minutes. They're perfect introductory videos to help advertise the college's work. I'd love to do something like this to advertise my written part of the class project.

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  5. Live footage is great but it is much less flexible than animation. If we used animation we can create anything we want in order to convey our point. Maybe a mix of animation and live video would be effective if done correctly.

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