The one site that stood out to me most this week was the Interview Project site that is run by David Lynch. At first, I thought I was going to hate it because when the page is loaded, all you see are these thumbnails. At first, I couldn’t figure out if they were pictures or videos, but once you click on them, you realize they’re videos. My point is that the site is horribly laid out, but once I got to viewing the content, I was completely sucked in to the stories of these people I didn’t know. The vast majority of the stories were hard-luck and I felt bad for just about everyone in the videos I watched because it seemed like they had all been beaten down in life. For most, it didn’t seem like they had really strong reasons for seeing the next day.
What I thought was also interesting about this project was that these were people that were randomly found on a 70-day trip. None of these people — to my knowledge — had any sort of agenda they wanted to get out there, unlike the Mapping Memories storytellers (not that their agenda was negative, but it was just the fact that they did have an agenda). These people in the Interview Project were simply telling the stories of their lives. One thing I kept wondering while watching these was how the filmmakers convinced the subjects to be interviewed. I couldn’t tell if it was a case of these people believing that there are actual good people out there who want to tell their stories or if they just went along with it because they would be on TV (in their minds). I definitely wanted to learn more about the logistics of how these interviews came together. I also thought it was pretty authentic to interview them in their own setting. Many of the background noises (e.g. loud trucks driving by) were distracting, but I think there’s a trade-off when it comes to how comfortable the subject is. If the interviewers had put these people inside of a soundproof studio, I think, while the distractions would have been fewer, the authenticity of the interview and material would have been diminished significantly.
I was also interested in the story on the Digital Storytelling website about the girl who really liked to ride the bus. I guess from all of the stories of genocide and murder — the very reasons most of these videos we’ve been watching have been made — I thought that when she talked about her brother being on the bus and showing her the way to the vegetable market, I kept thinking that she would say he had been murdered and that now her family is struggling. Instead, the story ended with her family thriving in Washington state, which was surprising.
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