Big final immersion piece:
Okay. There’s of course no way to know what the small story is going to be yet, as the reporting is what will determine it. This is of course especially true given that the immersion journalism thing is ALL ABOUT living the small story in order to prove or explore the truth of the big one.
So the small story timeline: a series of events that have yet to be determined, as they have yet to occur.
The big story, on the other hand, is going to be about the ways in which being part of a group that makes music together (especially this one particular bizzare breed of such a group) works on the human mind from as many of these ways as I find relevant and important to the story: neurologically, sociologically, culturally, historically. This feels enormous. And is. There’s a lot of reading and researching to be done this summer, and I’m going to need to be very careful not to back myself into some sort of “needs the scientific method” corner. Instead, I’m more interested in a review or overview of some discoveries people have made about this stuff, and some ways in which my experience in the OMB confirms or challenges or makes complicated those ideas.
This term’s history piece:
This should be easier, but isn’t. It’s not a very narrative-driven (as far as a series of scenes is concerned) piece, which is what I consider a timeline to be about. Instead, there’s one opening scene (invented and postulated and put together through research and photo evidence), followed by sections on the music (instruments and pieces), the culture of music-making at the time, and college marching bands of the time. These main sections will be connected by details about the general atmosphere of 1908, its culture, special acomplishments, etc., which I hope will build an overall atmosphere through which to understand the Boola Band. Oh, and somewhere along the line, the fact that this was “the beginning of the soundrack to being a Duck” should become important and plain. But shown, not told, of course.
