Words and Photos: Finalizing My Visual Narrative

It took me a few days to mentally gather my thoughts and begin work on my visual narrative. On Saturday night I grabbed my laptop and began typing away. My initial thought was to begin my story at the moment before we picked up the moving truck and sad our final goodbye to the state of Colorado. Once I started with that aspect of the story, everything else seamlessly followed.

I wanted the story to be a glimpse into my life as an urban nomad. Every year I’m moving somewhere different or taking a road trip back and forth across the country. The difficult thing about working on this narrative was trying to incorporate the important details without writing a short novel. I could have easily wrote an entire book about every hilarious thing that happened on my trip and all the mind blowing conversations my mom and I had while trapped in the truck for five days. But in order to meet the word count and stay within the guidelines for the assignment, I focused on the important moments and the emotion I felt.

The photos I selected where pictures I had taken during the road trip. Each photo was strategically placed within my visual narrative to convey a message that emphasized the journey. At first I only used a few photos in certain sections of the story, but then it felt as though something was missing. The photos were place in chronological order through out the story and I like the result. The first image is a shot of the highway ramp in Colorado and the last photos are pictures of Washington, D.C. and me spending time with my mom and dad.

The conflict/tension in the story is honestly the moment when I found out how long are road trip was going to be. I couldn’t stomach the idea of being trapped in the truck for five days instead of three, but my mom’s great personality and my wild sense of humor mad the time bearable. Once we got through out journey and the agony, everything finally came together when we crossed over into the Virginia state line. I was finally back home in the DMV and Colorado was becoming a distant memory.

©Jasmine McGee

ThinkSoul25

http://thinksoul25.com