Walk Paper

Walk

1.         The visual production I will be examining is my own, my word is walk, and it is located on my blog. My first picture is a standard crosswalk and then a single person walking. What follows are many individuals walking in very many ways: for exercise, while in sleep, underwater and so on. All of these pictures are accompanied by the song Walk Like A Man by the Four Seasons. Next are different types of pairs until another crossing sign appears but this time it is of many people crossing; a song switch occurs to Hello Goodbye by the Beatles. And as the first notes of the song are recognized, the Beatles walking across the street picture comes up and is followed by an onslaught of famous people. A few negative pictures of walking people are scattered based on the music and also many “walks for change” inspirational images are displayed. The theme is that walking is a basic action but it can mean so much more.

2.         This video creation is definitely an argument. The first images of what walking closely resembles an introduction paragraph. Then the switch that is the transition statement was presented through music and style of images. Celebrities and also groups of people were displayed in the images instead of the primarily singles and doubles originally portrayed. These facts are easy to notice and the connection between the two presents the argument to the viewer. And it does so much more than just plain writing. With the argument comes all of the feelings that one cannot begin to feel if someone just wrote: walking is symbolism. The images of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Harriet Tubman, Michael Jackson, and the Beatles makes the audience smile and remember through just seeing them. Then the audience perceives the connection between the images and the knowledge makes much more of an impact. J. Anthony Blair believes that arguments must be able to confirm or reject and my argument can. One can argue that walking is banal and cannot mean anything extra.

3.         The reasons of this argument are that walking can create change, bring hope, cause fear, cause death, and inspire the world. A cliché of walking is that “It all begins with the first step.” These claims are represented in this visual production through the inspirational music and the popular, easily recognizable people in the images. I believe that this is successfully expressed because giving examples through history, ties together the point about change and proves the argument. I think they would not have been more effective if expressed another way because if pictures of only random people walking would have bored the audience and lost the meaning.

4.         This visual production is predictable in the fact that all of the pictures, except for two pictures of signs, are of people walking. For a topic of the word walk, it is obvious that one puts in different types of walking. To be more discreet, I could have shown people walking away from opportunities, life, or a job which entails images of different actions than just the word walk. The walkers in the picture keeps the visual argument from becoming abstract or hidden and so supports the expressiveness of the production, but it can be too easy an argument to make therefore lessening its impact.

5. The order of visual images in a visual production is very important to get the argument across. Gunther Kress correctly connects time and space in videos of this nature. For my project, the images are timed so that the important pictures are longer and yet everything is timed to adequately match the music. The combination of audio and visual strengthens my argument increasingly. For example in the first half of my video, around every three to four seconds, a note is louder and stronger than the previous and so at that moment I changed to a new picture. Also, during the second half of the slide the good images of walking and the bad are placed so that when the Beatles sing goodbye, they say goodbye to the bad pictures enabling them to understand the difference and the meaning behind it. This makes the video flow better, keeps the audience’s attention, and makes them aware of the importance of each picture to connect to the whole.

6.   The visual productions I reviewed were largely successful. Most videos conveyed the message and also added emotional impact. Images definitely do what writing does and more. A visual production can be set up like a paper with an introductory image or two, followed by images that once connected, can make an argument. The main difference is that arguments made by images usually need more images or text to be understood. If you only saw a woman walking in my project, you would not understand my argument. But if you saw a woman walking alone and then later with a group, the message would become clearer but even more images would help. The fact that too many images confuse the audience does not harm the visual verses written argument because it is also valid that too many sentences in a paper can lose the reader. Writing does not convey meaning as quickly and effectively as images. Images do not have to be translated and usually one glance at a picture provides exceedingly more information than glancing at a page does. Also one has to concentrate more while reading to receive the full impact of the meaning and a mental image while one can generally watch a TV show and understand what is happening even if one zones out for a few minutes.