Digital Story Personal Statement

SoundMov is a website that contains information on the directions sound designers make that brings life to some of our favorite films. We aim to highlight some music composers or sound designers for their contribution that brought life to films through film scoring, foleys, and sound design in the form of short-form videos and blog posts.

The website is highly inspired by Soundworks Collection where they profile some of the greatest and upcoming sound minds from around the world and highlight their contributions. Soundworks Collection was created in 2009 by filmmaker Michael Coleman as an online destination that takes you behind the scenes and straight to the dub stage for a look into audio post-production for feature films, video game sound design, and original soundtrack composition. The problem with this website is that the videos on the site may be a little too long for people who are not enthusiastic enough to sit through the whole video. Millennials, especially, usually have a way shorter attention span and would lose interest if the video gets too draggy or not catchy enough. A recent AdAge study looked at how viewers watched videos from Youtube and ultimately abandoned more than 40 million unique video clips, which, in aggregate, have received nearly 7 billion views and less than 5 minutes in duration (Arellano 2011). For our website, however, we have decided to make videos that are short-form, approximately five minutes and informative.

My main responsibility amongst my team members is to research and find materials regarding sound designs and music compositions made by sound designers in films. I am also in charge of the audio editing for the videos. Because we did not have a proper team leader in our group, I made sure that everything is in order and everyone is doing their part for the website's content. It is a difficult task as I have my main responsibilities to worry about but I manage to pull through somehow.

Furthermore, we have created an Instagram page where we share images and videos about sound designers in films. It is a great platform for potential followers to get updates and short previews of clips of videos we made. A facebook page is also made which posts the same kind of content our Instagram page but audiences are able to connect with us better through that platform. This is to create a "digital self" in different social platforms as a group, which holds any information and content that can be provided regarding this project (Thibeault and Wadsworth 2014). But we were not able to accomplish this because of the tight schedule our members have with our assignments but we hope to accomplish this in the future.

Despite this being a small project for an assessment, I did learn some aspects of managing a website but hope to be more engaging towards potential audience through social media platforms as that is where the world is most connected. Digital is enabling us to become relationship-forming machines, to give and take (two of the foundational components of any relationship) with more people and things, faster (Thibeault and Wadsworth 2014). I find that it would be a waste not to take advantage of this ability so that we can be more connected and form a relationship with our audiences, which I hope to achieve next time.

Reference:

Arellano, J. (2011), Short Youtube Viewer Attention Span, Rural Telecommunications, Washington

Thibeault J. and Wadsworth K. (2014), Recommend This!: Delivering Digital Experiences That People Want to Share, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated

Soundswork Collection website: https://soundworkscollection.com/