I really enjoyed this experiment. I think that a video essay was one of the best mediums to represent the feeling of nostalgia because it can help to evoke that feeling within the audience itself. Audio and visual cues have a unique ability to make you feel as if you are submerged in the cultural and political aspects of the past. I found myself experiencing anemoia, which I hope is communicated well through the images I chose. I think that I was successful in creating a visual and audio experience for the audience. I would like to think that anemoia is a fascinating experience, which makes the overall topic of the project intriguing. I saw my audience as quite broad, but with a focus on the younger generation because I reference the current pop culture examples of this phenomenon.

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I did find this overall genre challenging to complete. There are a lot of factors going into the creation of this - audio and visual. I also took on the challenge of thrifting outfits for the footage of myself portraying the eras and also had to search for the clips online. There is a lot happening all at once and striking the right mood and balance of clips, music, and voice overs. While difficult, I do think that there has been no more rewarding project thus far in my writing career. It was able to combine all of my interests in digital storytelling. 

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My goal of this project is to communicate the feeling of anemoia while also helping to remove the rose colored glasses that we have when looking nostalgically into the past. We have to reconcile the psychological mechanism of nostalgia with the fact that we tend to use the feeling to ease our feelings of uncertainty and loneliness. I have been obsessed with this phenomena for a while now, and I was so excited to finally get the chance to explore it. In general, I think that there is a lot of material to work with within this topic, and it’s one that I would really love to explore further.