CONTEXT STATEMENT:

I conceptualized this idea along with a few others in the workshop class this semester. Out of all the ideas, however, my peers, my friends, and my family have gravitated toward the story behind me, which has undergone multiple name changes throughout my lifetime. My mother is highly orthodox, devoted believer and follower of the Hindu religion. In Hindu culture, as it is practiced in the Telugu-speaking region in India called Andhra Pradesh, a baby does not have an official name until the naming ceremony. 

Soon after the ceremony, my mother faced a conundrum: which Hindu mythological character should she name me after? And so, six months after I was born, the name that I received just a day ago was inadvertently changed at the suggestion of a priest. My mom would continue to consult the same priest throughout my adolescence and teen years. And so, whether it was me struggling with higher grades, chasing after girls, or finding a job, at every major hurdle in my life, my mother played the same part of consulting with the priest and changing my name.

I approached this story on the first go-around to lay out all the important parts in a draft of the script. Racking my brain and memory was the most fun part of this initial journey in my storytelling. Having so many changes to my name and telling this story to my friends and family over the years has naturally lent it a comedic tone. I struggled to imagine this story in any other tone.

The idea of reintroducing myself throughout the story was partly inspired by the constant reintroductions in the Spider-Verse movies, which I am a huge fan of. Once, the idea entered my mind, I could not imagine any other way. 

The toughest part for me was finding, curating, and eventually selecting the images for the storytelling. Original and curated images from my life were not just tough to obtain due to them all being in physical form in an album hosted in my home in India, they were also on prescipice of severe oxidation. 

Conveying to my father what exactly needs to be done to preserve those photos in digital form was incredibly hard. But once I was able to oversee this impossible mission. The rest was pretty much a breeze.

After discussions on the script and draft versions, my peers’ input and suggestions helped me narrow the story’s scope and focus on a few elements. When I recorded the audio for the draft version, which was a verbatim narration of the script, the audio ended up at six minutes and fifteen seconds. On-the-fly editing, with my peers’ suggestions in the back of my mind, helped me streamline the story around a central question: Is a name important to one’s identity? This also helped me edit out the unwanted things from my story.

Sources like Pexels, Unsplash, and Purple have helped me immensely in curating a set of representative images that contribute to the project’s comedic tone.

Overall, this was a great exercise in my understanding of rhetoric, creative storytelling, and the knowledge gained from the readings in this class.