Week 4: What makes a good video podcast? A Review of My Fav.

Cheating on Love
http://current.com/items/86355371_cheating_on_love

This video podcast was titled “cheating on love”. The podcast was regarding how monogamy is very difficult, and how common cheating on spouses/partners is. The video takes interviews from a few people all under different categories: married, in a relationship, single, happy in a marriage, unhappy in a marriage/relationship. The video is about one topic: cheating on love. A variety of interviews are conducted, all around the same consistent topic. What makes this topic interesting is that all of the interviewee’s had one emotion in common (regret) amidst their multiple perspectives. What makes the video particularly interesting is that the interviews conducted are on a real personal basis, and what the people say has a real emotional meaning to it.

The story covers real life symbols that affect most of us on a regular basis. Strong emotions of trust, experience, honesty, loyalty, betrayal; are all expressed first hand in the interviews which bring about direct viewer involvement. Although the story isn’t about something new, it is instead about something that has been happening for years, and that is exactly what makes it unique. It is a sincere address to those human emotions which have been taken over by the busy, fast paced world which revolves solely around the self.

The goal of the story is to portray first hand emotions. The interviews looked and felt very raw, since they gave out pure emotions on the concepts of love and cheating. Love has become a rare emotion in this wired world, where love is based on lust, on looks, and sexual attraction vs. Loyalty and personality. The one thing I liked about this video was that it didn’t have a lot of the switching and clutter-full visuals which are usually in all videos these days. The simplicity of the topic was evident in the display of the podcast and its representation. This topic didn’t need strong visuals, or abstract/crazy images, instead the full of emotion faces of experienced people were enough to transmit the message of the video. It had a beginning, middle and an end in a very unique way. The beginning included a distinct point of view which was that, monogamy is impossible today. The middle included stories about people who either cheated on or were cheated on. The atmosphere of the video is very comfortable and attaching as well. You feel interconnected with the people. An expert is also in the video, which makes the story line factual especially with the use of statistics. Real people with personal and real stories bring about an emotional atmosphere which makes you relate to these people on a personal basis. Honesty is a relevant symbol in the video, which is also a human emotion so hard to find in this cyber world. Towards the end, an interviewee expressed how honesty and communication are key factors, and another interviewee explains how they learned from their experience. What really worked in this video was how the interviews led the beginning, the middle, and the end, the entire story without explicitly saying so.