“Detroit” and Detroit by Kevin Chung and Edwin Gano
The video represents the juxtaposition between the media’s portrayal of Detroit and the reality of the city. It begins with a student searching Detroit on YouTube. What he sees and hears are the media’s cherry-picked ideas of Detroit: violence, dangers, crimes, riots, poverty, etc. This is followed by snippets of Twitter feeds representing how easy it is for miscommunication to occur between news outlets and the average person.
The next half of the video begins with students in front of a large abandoned building. These frames symbolize the intimidation or reluctance to enter a city labeled “dangerous”. The video proceeds and is presented as a simple home movie that takes a much slower pace compared to the fast graphical style of the journalistic display of information.
The tone becomes more conversational with the audios of Detroiters talking about their city. This brings a more light and personal relationship between the speaker and viewer. It transitions to a dialogue our class had with Sandra Turner-Handy and a video of her personal project that focuses on the youth of Detroit and empowering them to take back and redesign their communities. These last frames point towards a more hopeful future for the city.
Detroit: Ripping Away the Facade by Marta Goraczniak
By ripping away the facade of an abandoned building in Nardin Park and unveiling cultural aspects of Detroit collected as we toured the city, I contrasted decay and creation. The Detroit presented to the public through the media differs strongly from the reality of the city. My perceptions of Detroit before our visit were really inaccurate; I expected to see only streets of abandoned and burned buildings, crime, and a place that people had given up on. Instead, we saw neighborhoods and talked to residents that turned my opinion of Detroit around completely. I learned that there is a lot more depth to Detroit than just abandoned buildings, and the city is filled with a lot of passion and years of culture.
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