Camera Eye: This American Life Clip

This is the animated short I mentioned in class last night. It's a segment from the new This American Life series on Showtime. I titled it "Camera Eye;" I don't know what it will be called when its broadcast.

It follows the typical format of a piece on the NPR radio program, This American Life: someone telling a "true story." In this case, the show's host, Ira Glass, is interviewing someone (Jeff) about a playground craze they remember from grade school. Their conversation is paired with an animation by the artist Chris Ware.

I thought it might have relevance for our class for several reasons. The story is about memory. The story is autobiographical and presented within the frame of a program that itself is a kind of documentary/autobiography hybrid. And, the story is about the mediation of "real life" by the camera: something with consequences even when the camera isn't real.

I'm also interested in the way that the audio narrative is supplemented with visual images too. The Showtime series marks the negotiation of This American Life between different media. Formerly, the fact that it was a radio program, a purely aural experience, was essential to the nature of the program. It was a narrative form grounded in talking and listening, not looking. How will the addition of visual elements change this?

In this segment we see one approach, one that doesn't pair the audio with filmed footage of the incident, but with an obviously artificial illustration---a cartoon drawn in simple geometric shapes.