Introduction
Multimodal text is communicating your thoughts/ideas visions for a creation and writing through two or more different platforms. These platforms include textual, visual, audio and oral. By using these methods, the creator allows their audience to passively and actively take in the message they’re trying to create allowing the audience to become more engaged in what they are viewing/listening. When used properly these multimodal can create emotions that better translate the author’s message than the traditional written form. For the community connections project, my group and I created a video of our interview with Carolina Correa, a refugee from Colombia. Carolina escaped the violence of the Medellin Cartel and immigrated to the United States with her mom and brother when she was 12 years old. Since being in the US Carolina has made it her mission to leave her traumatic past experiences behind in Colombia and make a better life in the States. Carolina is heavily involved in the boys and girls club that helped her transition to life the US. From the interview we really wanted to convey that message in our video, that your past does not affect who you can be in the future which is something very important to Carolina. For our multimodal project we use both video/audio and textual elements to convey Carolina’s story.
What was your writing/composing process like? How did you develop your overarching purpose for the video? How did you go about conducting research, creating and collecting assets for use in the piece?
Leading up to the day of the interview my group and I spent time developing questions to ask Carolina. We weren’t sure what information we would receive from her so we came up with close to 30 questions to make sure we covered anything possible that we could use to effectively tell her story. To start out we researched her using resources provided to us by Professor Reynolds and also doing background research on her home country. Through our research we learned that at the time she left there was a lot of violence in Colombia heavily driven by the presence of drug cartels. Knowing this we prepared ourselves for an interview that could involve her sharing stories of what she saw and experienced in Colombia and potentially hearing stories of lost family members.
We decided in the initial interview that I would be the one interviewing Carolina so personally I prepared mentally on how to react to certain pieces of information that Carolina would share. I wanted to make sure that I didn’t offend her in any way which when she was telling her story. I didn’t want to push her for the sake of the interview but I also didn’t want her to hold back. Luckily for us Carolina wasn’t shy about sharing her story and talking in detail about what she had been through. We ended up with great interview we were really confident in and hearing Carolina’s story was so empowering that a person could go through what she had been through and still have such a positive outlook on life.
However, unfortunately due to technical difficulties with the camera our interview with Carolina was lost and we had to redo the interview. Learning that our interview was not recorded my group and I were feeling pretty low on the project. We had a great interview how could we recreate that? The genuine emotion? We created a lot of questions on the spot how do we know what to ask again? Regardless of our concerns we scheduled a redo interview with Carolina two weeks later. To prepare for this interview we took a look at our interview questions and took a lot out and added a few more in. From the first interview we noticed Carolina would talk a lot about her past on her own without us prompting her a question so we felt that would be a good method this time around to let her share her story on her own again only prompting her with questions when needed.
What affordances are offered by the aural, visual, spatial, and gestural modes involved in your video? Now that you’ve completed your video, how do you feel about your choice of mode(s)? Do they allow you to achieve what you wanted to with the piece? Why or why not?
Originally in our video we had the interview set up in a seemingly chronological order; introduction, story, process, life now, and outlook. However after feedback from a student in our class we thought it would be good to start off with Carolina saying that she never viewed herself as a refugee. Putting this first we thought would be good because it challenges people’s perception of refugees and would make our audience start to think that there is no one stereotypical refugee; that they come in all shapes, sizes, personalities and backgrounds and that not even actual refugees may view themselves as such.
Moving on from that we had Carolina introduce herself and where she’s from and then to her experiences in Colombia. While her experience was all audio, we decided to put the background of what was happening in Colombia in a text slide. During the slides that have text on them we added music to add the emotion we were trying to convey in sharing her story. While her story is sad and tragic she didn’t act that way when telling it so we didn’t want our music to be sad. So for the beginning and end we chose music that was more upbeat rather than somber. However, for the background slides we chose a more mellow song to match the description of the slide because the information displayed sets up what Carolina is about to explain.
We really wanted to show how despite the tragedy Carolina has been through she hasn’t let it affect her life now. We kinda wanted the video to serve as a message to refugees going through the process of leaving their country now that they can’t let their current experiences affect who they are in the future, that what you put in is what you get out. I think Carolina is a great model for refugees now and it’s something that we hope really shines through in this project.
With all of our choices, I believe that we were able to inflict more emotion and create a more dynamic piece of work rather than just a plain video and no added features. Multimodal pieces are able to reach audiences in many different ways, and we believe this video does that.
What theoretical and/or ethical consideration of writing for public audiences guided your work in this project? How?
We wanted this piece to
Conclusion
What did you learn through this process that you want to take away with you for future writing situations? What considerations of multimodal writing and/or writing for public audiences do you want to remember for the future? Why? How did your work on this project/in this class help you develop your capacity to be a critical consumer—and producer—of public, multimodal discourse?