can you communicate communication without verbal communication?

The process of making a video to communicate a certain topic without the use of verbal communication is a very difficult task.  With topics such as communication, time, politics, separation and abstract, the use of visual communication and nonverbal communication must be relied on to get the point of the video across to the audience.  These topics are very non-obvious topics that normally require some explanation, but not being able to use words creates an extra hurdle that a person must jump over in order to complete the task successfully.

When working with a topic such as communication, you must over exaggerate the use of communication or else the topic wont come across the way it should.  There are many different aspects to communication that you can focus on to make the video stand out more.  Because communication is such a broad topic, focusing on the whole of communication itself will make it hard for the audience to understand exactly what the video is that they are watching, especially because words are not allowed.  Take a topic like happiness for example, happiness is a subcategory of communication and is something very easy to communicate without the use of verbal communication.   Limiting a broad category to a narrower subcategory will make the whole process of making the video easier.  

Shooting video for such a broad topic is definitely a challenge.  When working with other people on a topic that is so wide, it will be hard to fit all the different videos together to make the whole video make sense.  If a group of three were to shoot video about just communication, there could be videos on such a broad spectrum from writing or playing music to showing empathy.  There are so many different ways to communicate communication and putting all the different types in one video will not show a clear topic and will be very confusing to the audience that is trying to understand what they are watching.

After the topic is narrowed down from a broad category, the video shooting process becomes much easier.  When shooting video for a topic like happiness under the category of communication, the video becomes very personal to the person shooting it.  The happiness of the person who is both in the video and shooting the video is very obvious to the audience watching.  The audience gets to see the person in the video doing things that make them happy, so we get to learn a little bit about that person just from watching the video.  You wouldn't shoot a video of someone doing something they hated with a smile on their face to convey happiness.  This is common knowledge, so because of this we know that the person in the video conveying happiness is doing activities that makes them happy.   This can cause slight vulnerability but will make the video less fake to the viewers.

Because this particular topic is being edited in iMovie, it is important to remember to film all of the videos horizontally instead of vertically.  If there are some videos that are filmed horizontally they will fit onto the screen nicely, but when they are paired with videos filmed vertically it becomes an issue.  A black border appears around the vertically filmed video and they two different landscapes don’t look well together.  This can become an issue while filming because certain things look better in one filming style while other things look better in a different filming style.  It is a challenge to capture a moment in the right way if it is filmed horizontally instead of vertically, but horizontally works better for the video overall.

Editing the video after it is shot is a completely different challenge than coming up with the idea and actually filming it.  It is an easy process to have a bunch of short videos about an agreed upon topic, but putting them in the right order to make them flow and narrate a story that needs to be told is very difficult.  Compiling three people’s different videos together that show their happiness is definitely not an easy task.  The order of the videos and how they are compiled will change the tone of the video.  Will it look better if the three people’s videos are mixed up together or if one person plays all of their videos one after another?  That is something for the group to decide.  A video about happiness would look better with the videos of different people intertwined.  If all of one person’s videos play and then the next person’s play, it seems to create a sense of separation and loneliness.  The nonverbal and non-obvious communication of a video is just as important as the obvious and the verbal.

After the video is put into an order that tells the story in a certain way, the next thing to worry about is music.  With a video about happiness, it is not hard to find a good tune to go in the background.  There are plenty of happy sounding songs that work well for videos.  The issue is correlating the song with all of the videos that are playing.  Using one song in the background for the whole time seems to make the video drag.  Using a song like Happy by Pharrell Williams in the background of the video for the whole video made it seem longer than it had to be.  When the songs were switched up, playing songs like The Circle of Life and Hakuna Matata in the beginning added spunk to the video that created never ending smiles.  Everything plays into the whole image of the video to narrate a story that the audience will in turn see.

Creating an iMovie that narrates a topic without actually using verbal communication is a very difficult yet rewarding experience.  The challenge puts a twist on the video that makes it entertaining for the viewers and creates a deeper meaning and really makes a person think about the actual point of the video.  Happiness is an easy and fun topic to communicate, because it is a universal feeling for everyone around the world.  Anyone can relate to happiness at some point in their life, and watching others be happy makes the audience happy as well.