Looking back at past readings, looking forward to the essay about the movie-making process

As we've been making the videos for the final project in this course I've been trying to look for correlations between making a video, writing a paper, and drawing a comic. The truth is in preparing for all three I've found myself taking essentially the same steps: transforming a rough idea into a structured outline and eventually into a (more or less) polished final piece.

The big difference is that with essays I've gotten this down to an almost exact science. I've written so many essays in my life that I know exactly which steps to take and how to take them. With comics and videos the path is a bit less familiar. However, I've found the same approaches that I've used to prepare for an essay can be applied to videos and comics.

For instance, when preparing for the video we created an outline of the different scenes, characters, and props and a rough draft of a "script" that we built upon as we went.

As I was reading Alexandra Juhasz's piece "Why Not (to) Teach on Youtube" I was immediately reminded of Ong and Baron's description of the resistance people had to previous advances in technology with regards to writing. Just as with the written word and the computer, people are hesitant to incorporate Youtube videos into a wider application because it is unfamiliar and people generally have a hard time accepting things that they aren't entirely comfortable with into their lives.

As with Juhasz's students, my group often expressed feelings along the lines of, "I'd rather just write a paper" because the process of writing is much more familiar to us, even though it's no more demanding than writing a paper. It offers different obstacles which are unique to the medium, such as problems with cameras, scripting, acting, etc.

Though the same thing occured when we were analyzing pictures and comics. Things Scott McCloud talked about regarding comics were just as unfamiliar to me as many of the elements related to film, yet at the same time there was also a very strong connection in terms of processes that allowed me to use my foundation in writing principles to translate both image and video principles into a language I could understand and was familiar with.