One of the things we had to do this week as watch this video called The Shapes of Stories by Kurt Vonnegut.  The way that he shows the structure of stories was incredibly interesting and simplistic.  The more I thought about this structure the more I realized that it really did apply to basically every movie or TV show that I had every watched.

When I was trying to decide which TV show or movie to apply it to I had a pretty hard time. As I talked about in my about page, I absolutely love TV shows (to the point where I own six or seven full series on DVD).  I finally decided that I would do Friday Night Lights. If you have never watched Friday Night Lights you are totally missing out.  Here is the Emmy trailer that was made for Friday Night Lights when it ended last year.

Seriously I adore this show.  I originally was trying to do the whole first season (which is my favorite) but that ended up causing way to many ups and downs for one picture.  I decided to do the season one finale entitled State.  In this episode the Panthers have made it though a year filled with players being paralyzed, having to forfeit games because of recruitment violations, players using steroids, and even having to build their own football field in the middle of a cow field (which was one of the best episodes ever).

Here is the picture that I made for this episode.

As you can see things start off good for the Panthers but quickly go down hill.  Luckily they come back from a 26-0 deficit at half time and win the game despite Coach Taylor leaving them after the end of the season. I’m thinking it probably had something to do with the motivating half time speech.

When I went to the ds106 reddit page I ended up watching Found: Lost Picture of the New York Blizzard.  Let me just say that this was one of the coolest things I had watched, ever. I ended up watching the next two videos that went along with it and I was thrilled for him that he had found the owners of the film and I’m hoping that I soon happen upon my own undeveloped film somewhere soon.  I think that this was digital storytelling at its best. He was able to let the film tell its own story and then add his story to it.  With the help of YouTube and email, he was able to find these people that he would have never been able to find without it.