Screen Story Rationale

My screen story had many different elements to it. Some of these different elements were actual footage I filmed, footage from movies or commercials, and footage that involved using a still background, a green screen, and a toy character that was telling a story. I will break up each section of the video up and discuss the purpose of using certain things such as voice overs or transitions when I did as well any positives or negatives that occurred.

The first scene of the video begins with a short clip from the upcoming movie, Terminator Genysis. I chose this movie because my screen story was designed tell its audience about robots and how integrating robots into our society is not a good idea. Terminator comes into play because it is a fictional movie about artificial intelligence becoming too powerful and fighting back against its creators. A person then wakes up from the dream and tells his friend while his friend tells him that it wasn't a dream. This scene used images to portray the narrative. I chose this technique because I wanted to grab the viewers attention quickly with a scene that is easily recognizable. Audio doesn't come into play until a character says, "that wasn't a dream". I added this scene to add suspense to the video.

The main narrative for the rest of the video is audio with some visual images sprinkled in. Examples of audio are when Lt. Dan is talking with pictures of Ray Kurzweil in the background, as well as Lt. Dan speaking with other backgrounds behind him, such as a terminator, roombas, and RoboCop. My initial plan was to have all of these backgrounds be videos instead of still images but the movie making software that I used, Camtasia, did not produce the effect that I wanted. For whatever reason, whenever I used a video as a background, the video lagged and only played piece by piece. In the end, I'm glad I was forced to use still pictures as the background because this allows the viewer to focus on the audio and instead of getting distracted by gunfire in the background. The first scene of pictures did use a little bit of imagery because I used arrows to point out Ray Kurzweil. Another example of this is when I circled the roomba. I still used small clips from RoboCop and Terminator but those scenes were for enjoyment purposes to make the video more interesting as opposed being in the video for educational purposes.

The tone of the video is serious because many of the important audio that is heard is based on real life things such as Ray Kurzweil, a roomba, and a humanoid robot created by Japanese scientists. The elements of the video that are most responsible for conveying this tone are the Ray Kurzweil scene and the Roomba scene. These two scenes are mostly factual and included to talk about some research that I did online.  The video is also serious because Lt. Dan discusses how robots could take jobs that are currently held by humans and he says not to allow this to happen.