Opening 3

For the third opening, we were instructed to watch a few videos regarding the structure of visual storytelling, as well as some other videos. These works left a bit more of an impact on me than the ones from the previous opening. I learned a lot about how visual storytelling is successful in today's society, as well as a little bit about storytelling in general. Also, there was much information on how one's culture should not determine their writing style. There was a lot of information to process from these videos.

To start, the first video I viewed was How Art Made the World: Once Upon A Time. This video gave a brief overview of the evolution of the format of visual storytelling. The visual stories presented a few thousand years ago would not exactly pass as great stories in modern times, but they were an important stepping stone to what we now have today. These stories started out as multiple panels of artwork that showed progression of a story, similar to modern-day comics. Eventually, music was incorporated into visual works, and that was the key. Aural cues are essential to the success of modern visual media such as film. The second video, Scott McCloud: The Visual Magic of Comics expanded on the information in the first video, by stressing that continuous movement is also a major element in visual storytelling.

The other videos I viewed are not quite as related to each as the first two, but still had a decent bit of valuable information. The Mystery of Storytelling: Julian Friedmann contained a bit of information on story structure. Friedmann stressed that there will be rejection of works, simply because people often fall into the trap of writing from their own experience. The truth is, a lot of people simply lead very boring lives. Sometimes you need to make something up to make a story interesting. This is truly the case more often than not. A story about a man going to the same boring job every day really will not make a good story until some more interesting elements, such as a major conflict, love interest, or shift in schedule, are introduced.

One of the other videos I viewed was The Politics of Fiction. The main message in this video was that a person's culture should not determine what they should write about. Basically, anyone should be able to write about anything they want to. A woman from a Muslim country should not have to write about something strictly related to being in a Muslim county. She can write about attending college in the United States if she wants. She could even write about some man living on Jupiter, as crazy as that sounds. One's culture should not determine the nature of their works. This really brings me back to a bit from comedian Gabriel Iglesias. Someone was interviewing him and asked him "What's it like being a Latino comedian?" To which he replied, "I don't know. I'm just a comedian who happens to be Latino."*

Once it is all said and done, I learned a lot from what I viewed. There are many key elements to great storytelling. Sometimes one's own experience just is not interesting enough. People can write about whatever they want. Some of this can be difficult to process at first, but it all makes sense in the end.

*Quotes not exact, taken from memory