 It's hard to say how people get their passions. I can barely recall what spurned me on this path, but ever since I was a kid I really had something for history. I suppose I can thank good history teachers when I was younger putting a passion into it for me, and RPG video games for giving me a fascination with people in heavy armor.
In any case, the second that "storytelling" or "sharing our stories" was decided as the theme for the Ladue View, I knew this was the time to whip out such an obscure passion. My goal was really to try and capture the excitement that I feel for history and my thoughts on how it connects the world together in ways people don't think about, and share my passion with others in a video. Unfortunately, that's a pretty tall order, especially if you only look at history as a boring lecture subject to be taught in stuffy classrooms, but I hope I could do my best to share the energy I feel for the topic. Research The research that went into putting this video together was easily the biggest amount of time I've spent on any broadcast technology project. It's almost impossible to describe how many pages of references, research material, characters, geographical locations, modern historians, and other troves of images I had to sift through in order to weave a valid story together through all of them. To say that the final script that I produced barely touched upon the research I did would be a joke. Every conceivable offhand reference or character name mentioned had a plethora of time put into them, trying to see what I could summarize, put together, what overarching story could be made out of it. In the end a lot of it got the cut to make a better video out of things, but the effort to get all the information together was immense. Script An "angle" to the video was one of the first things I developed, and that angle would be how stories people told in history is similar in stories people tell today, and they spread across the media collective, broadcasting, etc etc etc. In the end I collected a bunch of medieval stories together and researched all the connections between foreign or various locations or other stories they showed up in, and pointed them out. The script had to be changed plenty of times of course, and the audio recording took a bit to get the right levels on as well but overall I'm happy with it. Video Production The production of the video itself was very much near the end of the work cycle. Again, this was a very time consuming production! Luckily for me, Keynote was easy enough to learn all of the quirks of and before I knew it I was able to add in and order up the visual traits that I needed for the project. My only concern was making the video itself not look like an "active slideshow" and seem more like an animated thing that was the background to a lecture, like the history videos I watch which I based this project off of. In the end, I think that I managed to accomplish this goal pretty well. The animation quality might not be Mate Daus, but it's certainly visually appealing enough to not be static. Either way though, my main hope was that the information presented would be valuable enough to fill in for the lack of particularly flashy visuals. Overall I really loved to work on this, even though I had to put plenty of my own time outside of class into the heaping amounts of research and writing that the video would need to be successful. Regarding the final result itself, I think the presentation could have things added onto it to make it more interesting but there's only so much you can do when working towards deadlines. Nevertheless, working on something that I was passionate about and getting to participate in other people's films while I was working was really fun, and I enjoyed this project a lot.
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