Grow Reflection

1)    At first all you can see is a ‘g’ and an ‘r.’ Then the camera pans out to reveal the word ‘grow’ glowing against a mutant-green background. The scene blurs and the next image is a spinning globe. This is how the video “Grow” starts. As innocent as it begins, it does not stay this way. The production encompasses many of the terrifying effects of population growth, from overcrowding all the way to trash. It plays off the emotions and fears of the viewers in order to prove a point: growth, specifically in terms of population, can be detrimental to our society and way of living.

2)   The most terrifying moment comes seventeen seconds in. The music starts to get scary while the video shows a trash mound, slowly zooming out to reveal a bigger and bigger pile of trash. This moment definitely has truth value as it proposes a consequence of population growth that can be proven to be accurate, just as J. Anthony Blair states that it must. It convinces the viewer of the dangers of growth.

3)    The claim of this production is that the boom in population growth is bad. This is expressed through the dramatic use of music and images meant to play off the emotions of the viewer. In addition, in almost every still the camera zooms out in order to show growth. The fast visual pace also serves to illustrate how soon the population can spiral out of control.

4)    This visual production is predictable in that it plays off the passions and emotions of the viewing audience. Most (if not all) of the videos seen in class did this, from “Play” (feeling bad for the less fortunate children) to “Hope” (sadness for abused animals), making this a very predictable aspect of visual productions.

5)    In this production, the order of the images is meant to shock. It starts off pleasantly, with the word grow and a globe, however this leads to a more sinister strand of trash, space junk, traffic and more. Finally, to rub the message in some more, the video shocks the viewer. The order was really intended to fit the music, with the scariest parts (trash) appearing when the music was most intense. This helps the viewer grasp the severity of the situation.

6)    In some situations, images can do more than writing, however we must recognize that images cannot be the sole way of communicating. This project was meant to be all about images and a single four-letter word, however in reality more than one word was used. It was not enough to search “grow” in Google Images. I had to search many different terms in order to get the right pictures for my video. In fact, I had to figure out what the right terms were before I could get an image. The terms ranged from “overcrowding” all the way to “deforestation.” Therefore, words are still necessary and relevant in conjunction with images.

Works Cited

Blair, J. Anthony, and Christopher Tindale. Groundwork in the theory of argumentation: selected papers of J. Anthony Blair. Dordrecht [etc.: Springer, 2012. Print.

Kress, Gunther R.. Literacy in the new media age. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.

Spitzer-Rubenstein, Jessica. "Grow - YouTube  ." YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.  . N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Nov. 2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hEoUyseU1o>.