Hello Everyone!
First of all, here’s the video:
This was a really interesting project for me because I usually do videos on learning English on a YouTube channel called “Language Arts with Adam” where I have made nearly 200 videos. However, in this project I wanted to challenge myself and use a new platform, so I chose the platform “POWTOON” which a lot of my students are using these days. One of the biggest challenges of POWTOON is that it offers gigantic libraries full of contents including stock footage, copyright free pictures, animations, symbols… really everything. It was really counter-intuitive to use this kind of library because over the years I’ve been assembling my own library of stock footage and animations, many of which I created myself. However, even this process I feel really speaks a lot to the time we live in where we are using less and less of our creativity and imaginations… or perhaps it’s just that we are building far more from the work of others (at least less discreetly) to remix and create our own works. Another challenge was the fact that POWTOON didn’t actually let me make a video longer than 3 minutes so I had to create a bunch of 3 minute videos and edit them together later.
In terms of production choices and style, I had originally thought about doing what I usually do and just stand in front of the camera and talk. However, inspired by many of the documentaries I watched recently I made it more into a graphics-fest slideshow type production. In particular, I really enjoyed Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos series and tried to make my video into an exploratory style. It was quite fun but I think I still prefer my own style… perhaps in the same way as we resist adopting a new text form!
Last but not least, the video itself is about the history of logograms and an inquiry into whether or not there are legitimate logographic texts in our world. I won’t spoil the video lest you watch it but needless to say my findings were interesting. I also put forth a hypothesis in the end about a potential logographic text language that could become a global logographical textual phenomenon!
Here is the script and references:
