--- layout: post title: "Analysis of different mediums" description: "An ENG3U Assignment" date: 2019-07-08 13:39:00 categories: school --- In this post, I explore the way a change in medium effects the reception of a story. This post is focused around the story of [Chanie Wenjack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanie_Wenjack). ## Content vs Perception A story can be told may ways, commonly: film, comics, novels, and articles. These different mediums allow for changes in the way a story is received, while keeping the actual content the same. Many people do not like watching a movie based off a book because the director's representation of places and people "ruin" what the viewer had believed from reading the original book. This makes total sense, as a book requires the reader's imagination to build a virtual world in order to understand distances, directions, and locations. Whereas, due to the nature of a film, everything is represented via visuals which override the world and images left to imagine by a book. Aside from condensation of a book to fit the story into movie format, the actual content stays the same. When done well, any format change does not change the content to fit the new format, but instead makes use of the resources unique to that format to tell or show details that may me difficult to convert. For example, a narrator's opinion stated in a book could be integrated into a flashback in a movie or comic. ## The effect of various mediums on Chanie Wenjack's story When I first learned of Chanie Wenjack a few months ago in history class, I only learned a basic outline of his life. Through reading and viewing the following three pieces about him, the various mediums helped me better understand his story. A shift in medium is great to help augment a person's views of a topic through the following ways: ### Film The first medium I learned of Chanie Wenjack's life through was an animated film. [Gord Downie](https://youtu.be/yGd764YU9yc)'s to be exact. The nature of film helped me understand the circumstances of Chanie Wenjack's final days. Having a visual representation of the journey in my mind was very helpful in the path of underatanding what his final day where like, and what he had to endure in school. ### Article With the visuals an images from the film in my mind, I went on to learn further and in more detail through [Maclean](http://www.macleans.ca/society/the-lonely-death-of-chanie-wenjack/)'s article from 1967. Being completely text based, this article was full of detail and not much else. The same story was told, and I enjoyed the extra point of view and context provided in this format. ### Website To round out my knowledge of the topic, I took a look at the [Secret Path](https://secretpath.ca/) website. Being a website, the experience was very interactive and allowed me to specificity view topics or sections what were of interest. This site shows how well an interactive experience can tell a story, as anyone can explore the site in their own way.