Facebook Narrative Pt. 1

The first step in construction of the facebook narrative consisted of going through our subject’s wall and simply cutting and pasting most of the entries into a document. Then we surveyed the raw material, and made selective edits to cut away the dead flesh in an attempt to leave us with what we hoped would be a relatively clear narrative. From my admittedly biased perspective, it seemed that the story that resulted followed a traditional three act arc, beginning first with character establishment, then moving to conflict, and finally, resolution. I used some screen capture software to introduce the viewer to our character via an attempt at point-of-view editing of footage of me logging into Robbie’s facebook account. I then made a bunch of still screen captures using a function built into Mac’s OS, Snow Leopard, and did further editing of the still caps in Photoshop. The next step was to import the picture files into a Final Cut Pro timeline, and then structure the piece in a way that would convey the passage of time somewhat clearly in order to establish chronology. I was pretty happy with the way the piece turned out, only having some reservations regarding the pacing of the piece, and it’s soundtrack.

Robbie and I had our first crit about a week-and-a-half ago on the end result, what I believe was the third iteration of our attempt at a facebook narrative. The feedback we got was generally positive. People seemed to respond to our simple approach. It was interesting to note that people always wanted to gain some sort of clearer satisfaction from the story, with most people first asking us what happened. The interesting thing is that we don’t know. We shared as much salient information in the piece as we thought possible, so we know just as much as the viewer. I kind of enjoy the fact that our piece might leave viewers feeling unsatisfied, or at least with unresolved questions in mind. It is very rare in life that we are neatly handed the answers to our questions. So in that sense the piece, as it stands now, at least represents in some fashion that one immutable Truth of life.

The most major criticism revolved around my choice of music to score the piece. I again struggled with this, and in the closing minutes of my deadline just slapped in an early ambient work by Brian Eno. I didn’t want something with strong percussive elements, and was hoping for something that would be emotionally neutral. Unfortunately I evidently failed in this latter goal, with one of our guest critics describing the music as “sappy,” a criticism I wholeheartedly agree with. Some at the crit suggested that our music choice would have the unintended effect of editorializing the piece, and that this effect was unavoidable, and would result regardless of what music we chose. I’m going to try substituting a few different pieces in just to see what happens. I discovered the German group Popol Vuh after watching a 44-minute Warner Herzog doc from the 1970s about a ski jumper, and managed to obtain some of their music. I would tentatively describe it as either early ambient or new age, depending on your perspective, but I guess you could just say krautrock if you’re lazy. I’m interested to see if any of it works with the piece.