There are three stories here.
The first story is your classic love story - boy meets girls… except it’s a boy
meets boy, or girl meets girl story. The second story is about the struggle
over the legalization of same sex marriage in the state of California. The third demonstrates, through
photos people shared on Instagram and Flickr, how we use shared photos,
individually and collectively, to tell our stories.
I used photos publicly posted on Instagram and Flickr under the hashtag #prop8 to tell the classic love story with the protagonists the many same sex couples and the antagonist the legal system. There is no Jamie and Taylor. They are meant to serve as surrogates for all the stories that unfolded over this struggle. My goal was to use this project to demonstrate how shared photos contain a visual story language. The soundtrack is the instrumental version of Mackelmore and Ryan Lewis' Same Love. You can link to it on YouTube here: http://youtu.be/wIqSbooA2CM
The essential story behind Proposition 8: An Instagram Love Story is about two young lovers whose desire to be married is thwarted by the government.
ReplyDeleteMy purpose in creating this piece was to demonstrate how the photos that people share on social networks like Instagram tell stories, individually and collectively. I feel a piece like this helps people understand the phenomenon I am studying very quickly.
My audience will be other scholars. When this piece is finished I will use it when I speak in an academic setting to demonstrate my theory and stimulate discussion.
I collected photos that were uploaded for public viewing on photo-sharing sites Flickr and Instagram and hashtaged with #prop8. I strung them together according to the timeline of the same sex marriage debate in California into an iMovie.
This was a steep leaning curve for me, most if not all of the media I have created in the past has been business related, where I was demonstrating a point more than telling a story. In addition I was intimidated by iMovie as I haven’t used it for many years. I have a new consciousness that I can bring to future communications to make them more compelling and a comfort level with iMovie now that will allow me to add it to my toolbox.