Reflecting on the Making of “The Back of Your Mind”

The essay that we chose to adapt was James’ memoir, entitled “The Back of Your Mind.” In this essay, James grapples with a breakup between him and his ex-boyfriend, Juan. In this process, he confronts his own internal struggle of being both scientific and artistic, the former trait telling him that he should have known this was coming, and the latter letting things be unpredictable and ultimately expressing itself in the conclusion of the video as a song he writes. In the following paragraphs of this reflection paper, we describe our experience and process working together as a group to adapt this essay into a video representation.

The first decision we made as a group was to work with James’s essay because we felt that it would be easy to adapt to video form. As part of this adaptation, several portions of this essay were cut. These cuts were out of consideration for length of the essay. At the same time, the sections we decided to cut were deliberately chosen. For example, we cut scenes that directly involved Juan so that the only character shown was James. This rhetorical move maintains the spirit of the epistolary form of the original essay and its adaptation as this letter is coming from James’s perspective only, so we are only showing him in the video. Additionally, we made these cuts to preserve the center of gravity of the essay of art versus science. The sections of this essay where this struggle is strongly foregrounded, such as when Nik narrates “my science side told me I should have been able to predict this” were maintained in our adaptation.

We then deliberately chose the various sounds and science and artsy images in order to reflect our center of gravity, which is James’s struggle between art and science. For example, particles flying toward the viewer are a recurrent motif. This imagery is designed to visualize part of James’s science side, which believes, as stated in the video, that we could predict everything if we knew the position of every particle and the equations of the universe. Artsier images, on the other hand, were chosen to reflect his artsy side, for example, a piano to visualize the artsiness and also foreshadow the use of his own piano song. Synth-heavy music was used to introduce the conflict between art and science. We felt that that song effectively captured the pathos of introspectiveness and uncertainty that we wanted to convey in that section. Initially, we had thought we would have more music throughout the video, but we ultimately decided to only have music at the beginning and end of the video; we wanted the narration of the video to be the main focus sonically. The piano music at the end of the video, written by James, was used as an additional appeal to pathos, trying to create the sensation of nostalgia and moving forward.

Next, James brought up his concern of who to read the essay in the video. He felt that he would feel too comfortable reading the essay since it was written by him. This comfortability could have possibly led to the script being read too fast or in a too familiar tone. Therefore, we decided to use Nik’s voice because his unfamiliarity with the writing led to each word of the script standing out to him more as he read it. This meant that awkward phrasing that may have been overlooked by the original author stood out more clearly and was adjusted for the final recording. We also wanted to demonstrate the adaptability of the essay. Since adaptation was a key part to this project, we wanted to demonstrate that an essay by one individual, James, could be read by another individual, Nik, and still be able to have the same meaning that the original written piece had. This goal of continuity was what our group was striving for as we adapted the essay to a video.

Then, as part of adapting the essay to a video, we had to take into careful consideration how the images and videos matched up with certain moments in the script. One of our strategies was to have carefully designated sections of our video in which the visuals that we used were merely a solid black, a solid white, or a solid red background. Our choice to do this stemmed from our belief that those particular sections of the script contained words that resonate with the emotions particular colors evoke, such as nothingness with black and anger with red, much better than they would with an image. In other words, these colors were another appeal to pathos. These single color backgrounds also functioned as a negative space that we could quickly flash other images in as well. The quick flashing images were highly regarded in our peer review workshops and the solid images acted as a buffer from us having too many of these quick flashing pictures, which would harm the quality of the video if used in excess. We used the images and the videos that we thought would evoke in the audience the same feelings that James felt, like the picture of the flowers when James was describing love and the video of the light beam when he was describing how he felt lost. Furthermore, we incorporated a close up of James’ phone ringing with the name Juan on it and the time lapses of the Tribble courtyard and the sun over Wake Forest. We felt that incorporating these videos of these plot points in James’ essay would be more effective to the audience because it would allow for them to actually see what James’ was describing.

Adding to the aspect of video quality and cohesion with the essay, we decided to include a scene with James actually writing his song. This live action scene was meant help put an image to James’ feeling of inspiration and make it seem even more relatable to the viewers of the video essay. As part of this, we needed to be able to convey the song in a clear way. While the song was clearly distinct from the rest of the essay on paper, it was much harder to tell the two apart when we relied entirely on auditory cues. In light of this, we decided to include a visual component to assist in making the song seem more distinct from the rest of the script. The scrolling words of the song on the bottom of the screen was first proposed by Rebeckah and was concluded to have the most aesthetic appeal while also serving the intended rhetorical choice that we made. We all agreed that the song was a central aspect of the story and that we needed to include the visual aid in the video in order to have it highlighted.

At last when our final product was finished, we were in awe of what we had just created. We said that we would not change much about our video if we could, but we did say that one thing in particular that we could have done differently was use a tripod while filming the scenes. By using a tripod, the scenes of James studying and writing in the Tribble courtyard and playing the piano inside would have appeared less shaky and more stable. We went to the Bridge one day to rent one, but unfortunately there were not any tripods left to rent. Regardless, overall we think that we were very creative in our video and are so happy with what we have accomplished together. We love our video and are very proud of our finished product.

All in all, our experience working in a group was excellent. We exchanged numbers on the first day that we were assigned together as a group and created a group chat. This worked perfectly for communication and we were able to set up times to meet easily. We met multiple times to work on the project, seven times in total, which means that we were working on the project almost every day together. We also utilized Google drive, so we were able to work on the project on our own, too. We used iMovie on James’ laptop, so part of his role was putting the video together. He also refined his essay by adapting it to a new video script as well as acted in the scenes in the Tribble courtyard and inside playing piano. Nik’s role was renting the video camera and the sound recorder from the library. He also recorded his voice reading the script as well as videoed the scenes of James. Rebeckah’s role was finding music that could be used in the video as well as finding sound effects. She also looked for images that could be used in the video and thought that using time lapses would be a neat touch. Each group member, however, played a significant part in each role. We all voiced our ideas and opinions on how each task should be done, which ensured that the entire video was a group effort. We had folders for images, videos, the script, and notes on our Google drive, so everyone pitched in.

We have grown quite a lot over the past few months from taking this class. We have learned “the art of the essay” and have discovered that essaying is not a noun– it is a verb. We have learned that essaying is so much more flexible and adaptable than we originally thought and have learned that there are many forms of the essay, video form included. We have learned to open up in our writing and to be more vulnerable and honest with our audience. Intimacy is the hallmark of the essay, something that we thought was to be left-out of an essay, which we originally thought was solely a form of writing meant for academia. We have discovered that we are all essayists, something that we did not recognize before this class, and it is something that we will all take with us for our writing in future classes and the writing that we will perform beyond college.

Rebeckah Pace, James Falese, and Nik Silva