Sunday, February 4, 2018

Medium Specificity


I chose to do a video because I haven’t done one of those in this class and my new phone had iMovie on it and I have not ever used it. I choose to do a cooking video because I love food videos and watching TV about food. My video consisted of a happy track, shots of someone making banana bread, and a vintage filter. I love cooking and carbs are something that I adore. I wanted to create a video that seemed home and conveyed that the bread was delicious. I choose this type of video because I always find it kind of funny that we have so many cooking videos because in the end the user can’t taste or smell the end product. But we still have so many of them there are entire TV networks that have to do with food and entire companies that all they do are online food videos. The nature of video then means that the video has to really capture that in showing really tasty looking shots and with music or language smell needs to be described. Visual translates to taste and auditory translates to smell. These limitations lead to the way that food videos are often created—they have lots of closeups and often have a sunny feeling. As an audience member there is no way for you to really know if the banana bread that was made in the video was tasty. For food videos there are some literacies that one needs to know the use of close-ups, dialogue, music, color, and perspective is to all create this atmosphere to evoke the taste.
This then becomes essential when asking students to respond to this video. How would the video change with putting a horror movie score in the video versus a cheery guitar song? Changing the music could change the entirety of the video because it is where most of the story comes from. From this we can then think about the creator’s relationship with music and how that conveys the meaning of the video. It is important that we get students to start thinking about the media that they consume. There are hundreds of food videos that are created and can be found on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc. It is easy to just scroll through them without really thinking about them because we see them all the time. But what would happen if we changed our mindset? We thought deeply about why these videos are created and why people find them so enjoyable. Then we have this whole conversation that we can have about media and food. Why are we so drawn to videos of people making food? Why did they choose that specific dish to create? By getting our students to think deeply about media that they see all the time it opens up for a meaningful conversation.  

1 comment:

  1. It's interesting because I've never recognized the fact that the primary aspects of food (taste and smell) are absent from videos portraying food. That definitely limits the experience, but, like you said, we are still drawn to the videos. In fact, I can't scroll through Facebook without coming across different clips showing delicious treats or savory dishes. I appreciate your mindfulness in approaching this idea, asking why we are drawn to food videos and why are specific dishes made. This excellently captures how we and our students should be thinking as we engage with ideas and works. We must dig deeper than what we simply see or hear or do. You discuss quite a bit about the limitations of the medium of videos when it comes to depicting food. What are the specific allowances and beyond the choice of music, what did you find effective about the platform you used? Additionally, I want to ask you the same question you pose: why are we drawn to people making food?

    P.S. You were successful in conveying that the banana bread was delicious. ;)

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