"Lucinda": More Than a Slideshow

 

        From "Lucinda" by Elyse Marsh

For this week's post, the sample digital story I'd like to focus on is Elyse Marsh's short video, "Lucinda". She tells the story of how an old car became a close companion throughout her young adult life. While Marsh's "Lucinda" only utilizes photos and audio as multimodal elements, the piece tells a compelling and intimate story.

This video is a great example of how important one's script is when crafting a digital story. If we were to play the video muted, then it would seem like an average, run-of-the-mill slideshow of a woman's travels in her youth. The images shown sometimes even break Joe Lambert's general guideline of limiting a image's screen time to three or four seconds, at the risk of boring the audience. However, when we unmute the video, the piece comes to life.

Marsh characterizes Lucinda as an unpredictable, spontaneous friend who was constantly whisking her away on exciting adventures to unfamiliar places. A clever way she emphasizes this is a ten second segment of video showing a sequence of cropped images of specific states on a map of the United States. This succession of images becomes more rapid along with Marsh's voiceover naming off all the states that she and Lucinda traveled to, perfectly illustrating the whirlwind nature of their adventures. As this segment is placed earlier on in the video, it primes the audience to be excited about the tale that Marsh is about to tell, engaging us.

Her story drew me in so much that when she tells us of how Lucinda "died", I found myself experiencing a glimmer of actual grief. The true fondness with which Marsh speaks of a beat-up car and the near-poetic way in which she describes their experiences together caused me, a snobby video editor, to find a deep enjoyment in watching a simple slideshow. So, I'd say this piece is a perfect example of how a digital story relies heavily on substance and scripting, not just visual design elements.