Denotation - Sienna Santer's Channel
She is the owner of the Sienna Santer YouTube Channel that she uses to share with her audience her personal experiences, mostly as a student at Harvard. In this YouTube channel, the narrator shares her daily experiences as a student at Harvard University. The channel has 708,000 subscribers but this particular video on her Harvard senior year has 165,057 views (Sienna Santer, 2022)[1]. There are other videos on the channel with more than 10 million viewers. In this page, you can explore three denontative elements: camera shots and angles, narrative style, and narrator's visibility in the videos.
camera shots and angles
most of her videos, the narrator uses a variety of shots. At the beginning of the video, the narrator uses a long shot, but as she moves closer to the people, the shots change to medium. While shooting an introduction of her video, the narrator uses a medium shot that captures her chest upward and gives her space to use hand gestures. Most of her shots are taken in her university room, and during her video, her roommate appears briefly in the video and as the narrator turns to record what her friend does. For most of her videos, the shots remain medium and at eye-angle. Camera angles have changed many times in the video. The narrator's actions show the changes from one camera shot to another.
Narrative Style
The narrative style adopted in the video is subjective treatment. According to Visual Memory, the viewer "is treated as a participant" in this approach. From the start of the video, the narrator invites the viewer into her room. In subjective treatment, the viewers are shown what the character does and how they see it. The narrator uses invisible editing in most of her videos. According to Visual Memory, invisible editing involves using unhidden cuts. This approach supports the narrative as it places the narrator at the center. In the video on a day in her life as a Harvard student, invisible editing was used, and throughout the video, the Sienna is at the center of the video. The video follows a progressive approach in that it starts in the morning and proceeds to detail what happens during the day for the student. For most of this video, the narrator avoids being present in the camera but rather speaks from the background and explains the routine at Harvard University to the viewers. The editing in the video is unobtrusive as there is a systematic change from one scene to another.
Narrator's Visibility
Sienna, the narrator, appears for almost the entire duration of the videos. In the video on her moving into her new room, she appears for more than nine minutes out of the 13 minutes of the video. In a video of her life as an online learner at Harvard, she appears for more than ten out of the 15 minutes of the video. In the few videos, the narrator is not on video; she is behind the camera explaining to the viewers how she performs various things in her house or how the day was at school. While the video has one character, other personalities appear. While there are other personalities in the video, the narrator has not given them time for their characters to manifest. In other videos, the narrator shares the limelight with friends, while in others, she is alone. Most of the personalities appearing in her videos are friends and family, but those captured by the camera may not be acquainted with her like those captured while showing the viewers her day at Harvard.