I watched the Story of Stuff video on “Stuff” to write about for my blog post. Not only were the facts and storytelling eye-opening, but the animations kept it interesting. On topics like economy, consumption, etc. people can get bored easily and it’s hard to keep the audience’s attention. The different types of media in these videos though do their best to make the audience pay attention and care about the issues at hand.
The Story of Stuff videos are reminiscent of the UPS whiteboard commercials.
This video reminds me so much of the UPS commercials with the guy with the long hair drawing on the whiteboard. It’s basically the same concept minus the drawing. You have the lady talking to the audience in front of a white background with animations that look like they could have even been drawn with a marker. I thought this was an effective way to capture the audience’s attention because it was somewhat familiar to something they have seen before, but with better animations.
In this video there are several elements of convergence: the video of Annie Leonard, the flash animations above her and the audio that goes along with the animations, as well as having the video on YouTube on their own channel. If you think about the video not having one of those elements it would be much less effective. Without the video I would find it harder to pay attention to animations only. Without the animations I wouldn’t watch the video at all because it would just be Leonard talking in a white space. The audio that goes with the animations is probably the least important aspect, but it gives the animations an added dimension and improves the quality of the entire video because it makes it more life-like and believable.