Artist Statement

     I put a lot of time in to this digital story "I came back " because to me it was one of my deepest secrets, and that was something I did not want to share or to admit to anyone. However, I am thankful I did because this way I admitted to myself and finally accepted it and moved on.

    When I created my digital story, I wanted to project the childhood fear I had been living with all these years, and how I finally came out of the darkness. At the beginning I added the wording "I came back" in lower case and to the right side of the screen to project my uncertainty of my life and the words on the screen came out fast to represent I came out of nowhere. 
   I looked at home for happy photographs of my childhood because I wanted to show everyone how happy I was as a child. I wanted to establish my ethos with my audience to create a great visual story and using the pathos to connect with my viewer. During the digital story when I started to speak of my elementary days or negative events in my life, I made the choice to black out the screen to project the difficulty I lived and that I was going through at specific times in my life. One example is when I started to talk about school and how challenging it was because I did not know the language. At this point, I made sure the screen was black for several second to help the audience understand the length of time I was in the darkness. However, when I spoke about my graduation I made sure I brighten the picture to illustrate is was a positive event in my life. Right after that picture, I'm standing with my father and am very proud of myself and the picture is also lighter. I then started to talk about school, referring to college, and how it was not as important to me. At this point I start to fade out the picture to a black screen to reflect it is a difficult time for me. With the uncertainty that came after, my family filled that void. I used happy photos to show it was a positive time in my life. 
     I lost my job and my fear came back, but it did not last long. I then found a new job and I used a picture of a park to symbolize myself as I consider the new job easy as a walk in the park. Then, the fear of writing took over and I faded the screen to black again as the cycle continued. I flash forward to the 30 day challenge and used pages changing the note book I wrote in, to show the pages of my life as they pass. I then said, " I grew from this experience and learned a lot about myself" while showing a picture of a tree to symbolize my grow. The last picture I use of myself is a close up that I wanted to demonstrated how strong, confident and empowered I am. I used pictures of my children standing with the awards to convey to my audience how I have prioritized instilling the importance of an education in my childrens so they won't have to experience the same darkness in school that I did. 
   During my narration, my tone is very slow paced and calm to project myself as a mellow person. I decided not use any music because I felt it would draw my audience to the music versus my voice.  I added the words "I CAME BACK" in uppercase and in the middle of the screen at the end to show I am here and willing to do anything I can to improve my writing.