notes on narrative in a vidding context
laurashapiro asked: What's narrative? What follows are my tentative notes towards a possible answer (or several). Dialogue welcome.
In A Glossary of Literary Terms, M.H. Abrams defines narrative as "a story, whether told in prose or verse, involving events, characters, and what the characters say and do." This definition is accurate as far as it goes, but it' ( Read more... )
In A Glossary of Literary Terms, M.H. Abrams defines narrative as "a story, whether told in prose or verse, involving events, characters, and what the characters say and do." This definition is accurate as far as it goes, but it' ( Read more... )
Comments 71
Reply
Post-it notes it is, then.
Also, thank goodness someone else is using the term "lyric." I feel better.
Reply
Reply
Reply
I think I sort of knew this stuff, but I'd never be able to articulate it like this. In my liquid brain, I'm frighteningly organized, i.e., I scare myself, in how I think about vidding, but it's difficult for me to relate/translate it into literary terms. Thanks.
Reply
Reply
I want to have more community conversations about vidding - not for the sake of agreeing about things, because that would be boring, but to develop enough of a language that we're communicating rather than talking past each other. Genre seems like a good place to start, because the ways in which vids are divided up (the vidshows at VividCon, for example, or the categories in the BVMD) have little or nothing to do with the way I think about genre, and yet I think genre can be a useful way of talking about intentions and effects in vids, just as in other visual and written texts.
Our of curiosity, do you think the distinctions I'm making work in your own vids? Are there vids of yours that you could or would characterize as primarily narrative, lyric, or argument? Are there categories I'm missing?
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
and I haven't seen vrya's vids, but I'm having trouble imagining character studies as lyric
startles me! You should definitely take a look at Vrya's vids as soon as you have a spare moment; I think they will interest you extremely.
Hmm. One could do a very instructive comparison of Vrya's "Schism" to your "Transparent" as two very different but equally valid and moving ways of doing character studies, one lyric and one narrative. Or maybe "The Killer in Me" vs. "Transparent," since they're both Willow-centric, and what you lose from "Killer" being a bit more narrative, you'd gain by being able to contrast two different ways of vidding about the same character.
Reply
The thing about me and vids is, I hate downloading them. I have a dial-up connection at home. My work connection is fast, but then it's all about what I can do on the sly. And I always get so much more out of a vid on a TV or con screen than I do from the little RealPlayer or WMV or Quicktime window.
::taking a moment to pray for universal broadband::
Reply
Reply
I'm not at all sure that there's a clear distinction between argument vids and other types of vid from the audience's point of view - I'd like to hear other people's thoughts on that - but it's an important (if sometimes blurry) distinction for me as a vidder. "Here is what happened when Spike fell in love with Buffy" is a narrative; "Here is why Buffy's sleeping with Spike was a bad choice" is an argument.And what I'm saying is that I have seen very few vids that are simply "Here is what happened when Spike fell in love with Buffy." Maybe there are a lot of vids out there that simply tell a story without any particular agenda or point to make about that story, but I haven't seen many of them. Certainly not Spuffy vids ( ... )
Reply
Leave a comment