Ch 4 Jones and Hafner: Importance of Matching Images with Words and Argument

Reading this chapter has helped lower my anxiety over making the Video Argument. I’m not that technically savvy, and this chapter broke a lot of things I was worried about down.  The biggest aspect is making sure everything connects.  We touched on this in class already about the video that showed a lot of breathing but was really about climate change.  Because the images didn’t match what the video was really about, it was almost unanimous that none of us in the class thought it was a good argument or even enjoyed watching the video at all. Had it actually matched it could have supported the argument more and even created an emotional response in us that would make the impact more powerful.

How to use camera angles was also helpful to learn about.  If I want to be more direct and powerful, the camera angle has to be directly facing the object or person, not off to the side or too zoomed out. Making sure our words enforce what we are depicting in pictures or videos is also important.  On page 82, the camera angle is directly on the calf, which creates a more powerful emotional than if it had been far away in a field or off to the side.  The words are witty and the reader has to actually think literally about what they’re saying which also hits home. Seeing the example images and reading about how to create videos effectively using multimodal means is starting to give me ideas about what I think I can handle in making a video argument towards. Before this chapter I was struggling in trying to brainstorm so I’ll definitely use this chapter to my benefit.