Video Composing

In this section, our collaborators talk about processual similarities and differences between using traditional, “paper-based” writing techniques, and using video to compose academic work.

Responses in this category vary greatly in terms of specifics, but we feel comfortable generalizing that collaborators feel working through video as medium gave their work a kind of vitality, or kinesis, which seemed to contrast with standard writing forms. Farah, for example, called it “impactful.” Ped says “more engaging.” Val calls it “more complicated,” with “more variables,” and says it “asks people [viewing it] to juggle more than one thing at a time.”

Claire calls it a “tactile process,” versus “reprocessing, and regurgitating.” Hannah B. talks about a “feeling,” which she cannot describe precisely, but is more like “playing,” and seeing what happens, than with standard writing forms; and Hannah L. adds it’s “soul searching, too.”

Koeli describes an “immediate, visceral effect on viewers,” how people were “strongly moved.” Travis calls “magic” video’s ability to capture the immediacy of peoples’ physical reactions in real time. Similarly, Sean says, video, unlike print forms, “can capture spontaneity; you can capture these random moments that in the end, in the final analysis…they’ll fit, and you’ll use it.”

Questions posed to collaborators here included, how would you compare the process of composing with video to that of composing through writing? What does “invention” in relation to writing mean to you? How do you compare the different forms in terms of invention? And what do you think you could take from this composing experience into composing for other contexts?