Lest We Forget

I think it's very easy for all of us to forget that when I began this project three years ago, YouTube was just gaining popularity, and webisodes were a slowly burgeoning medium. Now, both terms have entered the cultural lexicon, with nearly every movie or television show accompanied by web-launched content designed specifically and exclusively for Internet viewing. There is yet room in scholarship for the untested and the innovative, and my project seeks to bring it to the forefront by exploring a new genre of multimedia communication within an academic setting, and to weigh its benefits and drawbacks from an intellectual and sociopolitical standpoint.

At its core, the project explores a new variety of multimedia information sharing. Documenting the creation of a serialized webisode series, "The Reunion" will help further our understanding of this complex new medium, helping to illuminate the creative process behind a webisode, some central themes and characteristics shared between them, and, ultimately, the capacity for this format to reach a broad, demographically diverse audience. The distance that has traditionally separated academia from its subject matter can be eliminated in this project, which examines an example of an art form as I create it.

As Gunther Kress notes in English At The Crossroads: Rethinking Curricula of Communication in The Context of a Turn to The Visual, a revamping of English curricula is needed to include a more expansive definition of “literacy” in light of emerging forms of media. Traditional narrative structures are breaking down, and as the visual becomes more essential, the ways in which we deal with video becomes more important. My project merely embraces this truth and seeks to explore an important new medium by working within its artistic and technical boundaries and engage with it creatively.

The story of my webisode series revolves around a single family. Dennis, Ben, and Julie are three siblings who spend every Thanksgiving together, despite the fact that they have an intense hatred for one another. Even so, they recognize the importance of family, and come together every year on this weekend to celebrate the holidays together. This year however, matters are complicated by Ben’s depression over his awful job, and by Dennis’ new girlfriend, who is actually a man (although Dennis is of course the last person to figure this out). As they come together, the series explores how they relate to one another and to themselves, delving deeply into how issues such as gender, career aspirations, and family effect contemporary individuals. Ultimately, the story illuminates a pervasiveness sense of cultural nervousness surrounding same-sex partnerships, and how this effects such unions.