More than the Sum of its Parts

So, I have a job. It's a part-time, online job. Basically, there's this company that sells video clips to people. They hire contractors to assign search terms to the clips and write descriptions of what the clip is about. It stretches my writing mind to find just the right words to describe a 10 second segment of video. But that's not the point of this post. The point is, lots of different companies supply clips to the company I work for. Like Sony. And Paramount. And BBC. And Discovery. A lot of the time, the clips are just random, but sometimes, I recognize where they came from. Like today.

This morning, I worked on some clips from a very memorable popcorn summer disaster movie of 2009. And I could tell that the clips came from this movie. They were all chroma key. (There was a blue screen behind many of them to add special effects later.) There was even a couple of shots of a toy boat being capsized in a puddle. (Does that give it away? I probably shouldn't give it away.) All of these shots had been unimproved. They were completely raw, as they might have been sent to the editor. And I couldn't help but think of my writing.

What I saw this morning was pretty random. Unpolished. And if you added it together as it was, you wouldn't have much. But, with some polish and flash, a bit of editing and storyline, you end up with something that is so much more than just a collection of images. And that's what we are trying to do with our writing. We want to bring everything together, with some spit and polish. And then have the readers bring their experience and expectations to it. Together, we make our stories more than what they would have been.