A world made of stories

‘A world made of stories’ is a very vast interesting brief that our group took very literally. Everyone has an exciting, one of a kind story to tell and so we took this opportunity to tell our unique, personal stories. We took DCU as the common ground and worked around that. We decided we would video how we made the life-changing choice to choose and get accepted to DCU.  

Áine and Sam decided on the original concept of our ‘Our Journeys’. We all have extremely different backgrounds, this meant the video would be interesting and not repetitive but also inclusive of a diverse number of people. Each group member then took video footage of what they have done outside the college, their interests, hobbies, work and anything specifically that allowed them entry into DCU. We came together to edit the footage Naomi and Áine working on their clips and Sam and Dave working on theirs. Naomi then edited the introduction and closing clips and Áine wrote the report.

This video was constructed in a documentary style as it concentrated on the unique entry routes to DCU. The video told our personal stories and backgrounds while documenting how we got accepted to DCU. To film the video, we used our phones this worked well but unfortunately, Áine was unaware that video footage should always be filmed landscape. This left her personal clip looking unprofessional and unfitting with the rest of the piece. To add variety and personal touches to the video we all recorded voice-overs to describe our journeys. This worked well, and we feel the clarity of our voice overs improved from the audio track. Although we all had individual narrative pieces they all shared the same basic structure having the same opening and closing lines. This meant they all had a certain element of unity. We chose to narrate the video by a voice over track, this meant that the sound from the video footage had to be erased to ensure the voice over was clear. For the closing scene, the video footage had to speed up to get shots of all group members in.
The American poet Muriel Rukeyser famously wrote that “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” It was this quote that inspired us to tell our stories. None of us has particularly extraordinary stories but it is the everyday stories that keep everyone in conversation, teach one another about each other and teach children right from wrong. For this reason, we decided to document our normal but unique stories.
As this was a documentary there were no abstract meanings to anything we shot. Our footage was actual representations of our homes, jobs and hobbies that represented our interest in various things.  

To tell our stories through a video we needed both visuals and audio pieces. To make this easier for ourselves we recorded both separately and while editing joined the two together. This meant we could give our entire concentrating to the video when shooting the video clips and all our concentration to the voice overs when doing them. This meant that both pieces were better quality. We filmed separate shots meaning that we were unaware of the shots our other group members were taking or the length of the shots they were taking. It was not until we came together that we realised that we had too much footage to squeeze into a two-minute video. This resulted in us having to cut Dave’s individual piece from the video.
The video shows three individual stories and how they come together. This coming together of stories is inevitable in life as everyone’s story has an effect or a connection to someone else's, this occurrence is due to us living in a world made of stories.