Medium Shapes the Message

Like in any form of art, telling a story wants to elicit a response from its intended audience. There are many ways in which the story can be told: traditional ways such as novels, plays, or poetry or newer media such as blogs, vlogs, podcasts. Depending on the media used in telling the story, its message can be perceived in different ways. I will illustrate some examples using the story of Chanie Wenjack as told in  Secret Path,  a  song album  by Gord Downie with a  graphic novel  by Jeff Lemire.  Chanie Wenjack is a boy who escapes a residential school in Canada in 1966 and tragically dies trying to get home.  To start off, it would be hard to use only a blog as the medium to tell the story from “Secret Path”. A blog has a shorter format than the other media, and you cannot tell a story with a lot of detail. However, a blog can be engaging, if written in language which is accessible, appropriate to the topic, and engaging for the audience. B...

The format of a blog does not let you get into all of the details that a novel could. For instance, in the graphic novel, Chanie's current life is painted in sepia tones to convey how dreary, and bleak everything is for Chanie. In contracts, the flashbacks to his family and home are bright and colourful. In an actual novel, the same depth of emotion can be conveyed with words, which can elicit the same type of emotion as the colours in the graphic novel.  The same way words can be used to create a rhythm, a movie could serve the same purpose. If a movie is well done, it can convey the same type of emotions as a well written novel by appealing to our visual and auditory senses. I think a movie about Chanie Wejnack would be in the drama genre, where every scene emotions would be depicted just like in the graphic novel.

The type of medium matters, and art and feelings can be shown through different vessels. When the writing is good, and the movie adaptation of a book is good, it is a matter of taste which one we like better. Sometimes I like the book better, like in the Hunger Games trilogy, but sometimes I like the movie better, like in the Harry Potter movies. Chanie Wenjack’s story is particularly haunting. I like the graphic novel and the music, and I will read Joseph Boyden’s book. I think that maybe someone will make a movie about Chanie which I would like to watch.