THE MEANDERWALKER

This semester I took an Intro to Video Production class. It’s a core competency course for me, which means it’s a really low-level undergraduate course, which means it’s primarily filled with sophomores and juniors. Luckily, one of my fellow first-year master’s students also decided to take it, because we had to partner up with someone for the entire semester, and since we’re taking 3 out of 4 class together, our schedules matched up really nicely for getting our projects done for this class.

Our final project for Video (due yesterday) was to make a music video. Our professor gave us a list of artists we could choose from (like, The Platters, Ella Fitzgerald, BB King, Stephen Sondheim, etc), but we persuaded him into letting us do Tom Waits’ “Hold On.” Here’s what we came up with

(Click the link to view on Vimeo):

Tom Waits – “Hold On” from Lauren Frohne on Vimeo.

It actually turned out to be a really fun project. We were both a little worried it would be too time-consuming and tedious and conflict will all the other graduate-level junk we had going on, but it was fun to shoot, our talent was great, we liked our footage and it wasn’t too tedious to edit together. Overall = SUCCESS.

The part of the project that got me a little frustrated, though, was watching everyone else’s videos in class. It’s not that that were poorly shot or edited or anything. It’s that they all followed the rules and picked songs like “It’s In His Kiss” and “Jolene” and “Tracks of My Tears”), and almost every single one of those videos included a love-sick, sad sally, wet towel of a girl sobbing about the misdeeds of a man or begging for affection. It was kind of disheartening. I mean, maybe our video isn’t any different, except that the premise is reversed: the girl takes an independent leap and the guy is left in isolation; but, they have similar experiences and emotions in their similar/separate situations. But it was a glaring trend among the other videos in the class, which I might add is comprised of 20 girls and 1 guy.

I’m not sure if it’s attributed to the themes in the music of the era we had to choose from, or if those kinds of social and gender stereotypes are still so prevalent in our generation, but it was disappointing to notice that it’s a concept that so many people adhere to.

But either way, we really like our video and you should watch it!

(PS – it’s not really 7 minutes long. It’s 4:30, but I forgot to chop the end of it off before exporting and haven’t been back in the lab to do it!).