Choosing a speech

 After careful consideration I decided to base my work on the Nelson Mandela speech. Having lived through the time of the events in South Africa and I remember the protest outside of the SA embassy for years in london, I felt I had some connection with it. The first thing I did was to cut the speech into one minute length ending with the line “it is an idea for which I am prepared to die.” I listened over and over and soon realised that having the speech running exactly to one minute gave me no space. This meant I would have to include it from the start of the video to the end. I was able to cut out a few words and still retain the sense of the speech.

Word cloud

 

The extract now contains only 94 words considerably fewer than the whole speech which lasted three and a half hours. I had seen some of my colleagues make a word cloud. I had never seen this before so I found a web site that created them and here are the results. I find it interesting that the word want and idea are the biggest. 

Here is the full text that I will incorporate into my video I had to add a few words from published copies as they where different from what he actually said -:

 

We want to be allowed to travel in own country and to seek work where want to when we want to and not where the labour bureau tells us to. We want a just share in the whole of South Africa. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live to together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for. But my lord if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Word cloud