Eclipse Movie

I made this movie for an experimental (but very successful!) course taught by Professor Faranak Miraftab in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during the Spring 2021 semester. UP 494: Digital Storytelling began with several readings on ethnography, perspective, and narrative. The second half of the semester focused on cutting-edge techniques in collaborative storytelling and digital mediums. Professor Miraftab’s course quickly became one of my favorite classes because it combined visual/digital art with real planning problems, which is something I’d already been exploring for a while in my personal projects.

Eclipse Movie was my submission to the course’s midterm project assignment. Since 2017, I’ve had audio footage of the gathering at the total solar eclipse in southern Illinois on my phone. I never knew what to do with it because, as you’ll learn in the video, I lost all my visual footage of the extraordinary event. Until I had read more about contemporary storytelling techniques in this course, I didn’t know how to incorporate the audio footage into something with a strong narrative arc.

Special thanks are due to Sarah Bassett and Peoples Culture for speaking before our class and inspiring my work.