…is blogging’s cinematography. In some kind of convoluted way in my head anyway.

As significant as mise-en-scene is in establishing the aesthetic of a film, I have begun to consider the implications of typography and general design in setting the mood for my blog-based documentary.

I have chosen a very simple template, one that flaunts the typical layout for a blog, with all of the main features in clear view to make navigation easy for the user. I have customized the colour scheme to my liking, choosing green as it is a significant colour for the St. Fidelis community around which the documentary subject revolves, and then finding other colours that I believe work with it.

I start to wonder however, whether or not the ‘look’ of the blog should aesthetically imply the kind of story it tells. If the answer is yes, then perhaps I am not achieving this. If the answer is no, then I shouldn’t even wonder.

Contemplating design led me to further consider the importance of typography, especially as a blog is very text-driven (although more so in its early days). Given that my blog is hosted for free by WordPress, there are limitations of what I can do in terms of design and typography. Hence I decided to use the most simplest template I liked so the focus would be more on story content- its production and distribution- rather than how the blog looks. Yet I cannot overlook the fact that how things look play a part in the way they are received and interpreted.

A while ago, I wrote an entry on my personal blog about this very issue: the power of words on screen and what web-writing in a blog allows you to do. Re-reading my thoughts back then has got me thinking about what I can do with typography in my blog documentary that will enhance the way the story is told. How can I use typed words to convey certain emotions in the way that can be done with the human voice and the spoken word?

I came across a Research Paper on Kinetic Typography that discusses the idea of emoting through web-based text but thought it too intense to be entirely relevant to my practice. Typography seems to be in itself, its own art form, discipline, that it could be explored in a whole different research project. Nevertheless, I think it is something else to think about in terms of the aesthetics of blog-based documentary storytelling and I’ll keep it in mind as I continue producing.