Process

To create my outcome, I watched a YouTube video on the making of the movie. The video included clips from the film and I took screenshots of frames that I thought were representative of milestones along Chris McCandless’ journey. Then I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to order them and how long to play each – this was the hardest part of my process. I tried to sort them into a four sections:

- Beautiful landscapes in Alaska where he thrived and lived boldly
- Facing hardships and struggling to live
- Cleaning himself up and the journey to Georgia
- Transitioning and settling into life in Atlanta

Once I had a reasonable order for the frames, I threw them into iMovie and added audio: Lewis Watson’s song “Into the Wild”. 

The biggest design decision I made was to use still frames rather than actual video clips. I decided to do this because I thought the frames were more indicative of quick snapshots into his life. It’s easy to lie, or manipulate the truth, when you don’t get the whole picture. Each frame is a tiny peek into one part of his life, but the story isn’t apparent until we put a bunch of frames together – and this is where I had the flexibility to create a new story.
I also considered adding text captions to the video to tell the story, something along the lines of the following:

Chris McCandless lived in Alaska. All on his own. He explored. He adventured. He lived loudly. Boldly. Beautifully. Wildly.

Home was an old broken down bus. Alone but not lonely, he provided for himself.

But life got hard. Scary. Dangerous. He was cold. Hungry. Broken.

And he eventually decided he'd had enough. He cleaned himself up. He walked. He hitchhiked. He drove.

He reached the city. He didn't fit in. He was out of place. Confused. Overwhelmed.

He met a family who took him in. He worked hard in school. Graduated. Established himself. Lived a new life.

I ultimately decided not to include the script I had written because I didn’t want to give my entire intention away. The whole point I’m trying to make with this project is that we can tell an entirely new story by selecting pieces to show. The new story is realized when the audience fills in the gaps – all the details and causal relationships they infer from frame to frame. I thought that literally spelling out the plot of my new story took away from that larger goal and would just become a distraction.