One particular assignment from my Producing Media for Learning course left a lot to the imagination… Here was our prompt:
Choose an aspect of the following passage and reflect on, define, interpret, or reenact it: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”
This post includes the backstory on this strange prompt, my submission for this video assignment, the inspiration behind my submission, and some production notes.
The backstory on this assignment
Yes, “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”
It’s a real sentence! Linguaphile that I am, I enjoyed learning about this.
“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a grammatically correct sentence in English that is often presented as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity. It has been discussed in literature in various forms since 1967, when it appeared in Dmitri Borgmann‘s Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought.
The sentence employs three distinct meanings of the word buffalo:
- as an attributive noun (acting as an adjective) to refer to a specific place named Buffalo, the city of Buffalo, New York, being the most notable;
- as the verb to buffalo, meaning (in American English[1]) “to bully, harass, or intimidate” or “to baffle”; and
- as a noun to refer to the animal the buffalo (often called bison outside of North America). The plural is also buffalo.
A semantically equivalent form preserving the original word order is: “Buffalo bison that other Buffalo bison bully also bully Buffalo bison.”
Wikipedia (Yes, I know, Wikipedia isn’t the best source. You’d probably read the Wikipedia article if you looked this up on your own, though, wouldn’t you?)
Buffalo: A guided meditation
Here’s my submission in response to the assignment prompt: a guided meditation that uses the word “buffalo” as an anchor.
The inspiration behind this video (it all started as a joke)
Being that I found the etymology and meaning so interesting, you’d think it would have been easy for me to come up with a project idea, right? Especially since the professor was clear that it was an intentionally open-ended prompt and that almost any reasonably safe video idea was open for submission.
Even so, I found myself struggling to come up with a project idea that I thought was “just right.”
“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” was scrawled on my whiteboard, along with a hilarious amount of markup and doodles of buffalo and chicken wings (both drumettes and wingettes, because I’m an artist).
Isn’t it odd how sometimes the most open-ended, autonomous assignments can be the most daunting? Each time I looked at the doodles on my whiteboard, the buffalo taunted me. I knew I needed to script something out soon to stay on track with the assignment milestones, but I had a wicked case of writer’s block.
After spinning up several ideas only to poke holes in them from a logistic perspective, I was feeling rather defeated. All I had was “put something together about semantic satiation,” because by this point, I had spoken, read, written, generally contemplated the word buffalo so much that it no longer had any meaning.
I chatted with a friend, lamenting my situation and admitting that, in general, I hadn’t been feeling super balanced between life, school, and work. She reminded me of guided meditation videos as a tool for self-regulation and recharging. She referred to one in particular, which has some colorful (and, frankly, relatable) language. This led us to joke about making a guided meditation video centering on the word buffalo.
Then, suddenly, the joke felt less like a joke and more like “the perfect idea for this project.”
I finally felt like I had something I could run with. Over the years, I’ve been told more than once that I have a soothing recorded voice. On top of it, I was looking for ways to prioritize mindfulness practices for my own self-preservation.
Why not take a first step towards my own inner peace by making a guided meditation?
Production notes
After watching a few (G-rated) examples of video-based meditation for inspiration, I storyboarded a script and got to work filming and curating visually mesmerizing footage available royalty-free from Vimeo & Flickr users.
I used an iPad for all the shots I captured specifically for this project, which were the wildlife and grassy shots. I dragged Tighe out for a hike around the South Park Game Preserve for those, since it just so happens to be in the greater Pittsburgh area and the home to some buffalo. I also captured a 3.5-hour time lapse of the morning sky from the 23rd floor of an office building in downtown Pittsburgh.
I also drew from my own library of earlier videos. Most of the repurposed footage came from my Android Turbo mobile device.
I produced the final video in Camtasia, using a Blue Snowball mic to record narration.
The background audio is called “Soft Euphoria.” It was available on Free Music Archive at the time of original publication; however, it appears that it may no longer be posted there.
Fantastic and thanks for sharing