Personal Identity: Video Analysis

I found this project to be quite intimidating considering I have zero creativity and artistic talent. Thus, this project was a learning experience for me. I decided that my project would take form in a video. I decided this because I’m incredibly self-conscious and shy. Also, because presenting is one of my biggest fears. I wanted to focus on personal identity because it’s the section of the course I enjoyed most. When discussing personal identity in class I couldn’t help but remember every show I’d ever watched take on the subject. That’s why I decided that my video would be a video mix/ collage of clips from the media's portrayal of personal identity. I had this great idea next was to put it into action.

The biggest

The first clip contains a voice-over that explains what soul theory is. That according to the soul theory a person is only the same person over time if they have the same immaterial soul. To represent this view I used a clip that I remembered from my childhood of Tom and Jerry. The clip is of Tom getting hit by a piano and dying. After he dies, his soul ascends from his body and takes a mystical latter to cat heaven. The Tom and Jerry scene is silent with only the background song used throughout the video. I also used a cool fading out transition to move into the clip of the Scooby Doo movie. In that clip, Fred’s soul / spirit jumps into daphne's body and vise verse. Both clips embodied the soul theory.

For instance, the Tom and Jerry clip showed that tom is his soul. This clip represents the dualist view, in which the self is a soul that can persist physical death. Although tom’s physical body died, tom still existed through his soul. The Scooby Doo clip also represented the soul theory well. The clip suggested that if a person’s soul is not in their body, they are not longer that person. Daphne’s body was no longer Daphne because it contained Fred’s

The scene showed that although the two girls have similar bodies and faces it’s their personalities that give them an identity. One is defined by being strict and very on top of things while the other is all about having fun and going with the flow. I also only used a short clip for this section on personal identity because personality changes over time .In my opinion its the least credible of the views because we don’t have the same personality over time. Thus, stomping, on the whole, how do I know who I am over time questing.

The next clip in the mix is the life montage at the beginning of the movie up. Which basically sums up a couple’s life until the wife dies. It shows the important moments in a couple’s life until death separates them. I decided to use this montage because I connected it to the narrative