Artist's Statement (Digital Story)

An Artist’s Statement

I chose to create my digital story based around an event in my life that led to me start using tobacco, something that is no longer a part of my life thanks to my 30 day challenge. I knew going into my 30 day challenge, which was to quit smoking cigarettes, that it was a task that I could accomplish easily if I actually wanted to accomplish it. It was a complete success. It has been two months and one week without tobacco or nicotine. The hardest part came when I was informed that the digital story had to be about my 30 day challenge. It just so happened that me quitting tobacco was not interesting enough to make a digital story about. I had to think hard about a story I could tell the world that was interesting, tied into my 30 day challenge, and caught the audience's attention.

I centered my digital story around my time deployed to Afghanistan while serving in the U.S. Army Infantry. I started the digital story with a title screen with the date of the emotionally traumatic event I witnessed. I immediately started to show pictures of all of the mountains that I was surrounded by. Six different pictures that I took while overseas. I followed that up with a four to five second black screen for dramatic effect. Then I chose to show six pictures of the main highway in Afghanistan, a road that I spent a large amount of time driving on. I also inserted a black screen for five seconds following those pictures. Next I had six pictures showing the kinds of activities and shenanigans that happened inside the truck I drove. This was again followed by a long, pausing black screen. I chose to show these pictures following them with the black screens to slow down the tempo of my story and create a very serious tone. All the while that this was being shown I was narrating what the pictures showed and the memories and feelings they brought to my mind.

I then presented photographs of the men I was deployed with, the men I spent ten months living with in extremely close quarters, that I have come to call my family.  I wanted to show the entire platoon to the audience. I then displayed individual pictures of the guys I became closest with while we were in a combat zone together. The next part was a 15 second long black screen where I used long pauses in between the sentences I was narrating to create a sense of tension. This was all leading up to the big “reveal” of my story. The main focal point picture. The picture of a destroyed MRAP (Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected) vehicle. The very same MRAP that I witnessed fly 17 feet into the air. This all made for an interesting and gripping story. The only problem is that up until this point the digital story had yet to have anything to do with my 30 day challenge.

Finally I showed three pictures of myself using tobacco while in Afghanistan. This was where I could finally tie the entire story back into my 30 day challenge. I continue on to explain that my life changed after witnessing such a horrific incident. I began smoking and using chewing tobacco heavily to help calm my nerves and try to maintain focus while on combat patrols. The 30 day challenge that I chose was something that I had been wanting to do for a long time but always came up with stupid excuses to tell myself while I continued to smoke. Quitting cold turkey was probably the best decision to make while doing this challenge because it gave me the chance to prove to myself that I can do anything I want to as long as I have the mental strength and willpower to do so.