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       Entering writing 321 I was a bit intimidated by the goal of the semester: to create a video reflecting one’s quest for refugee. For several reasons I was worried. Initially, I was worried about the lack of skills I possessed working with movie- making devices such as I-movie. Secondly, I was apprehensive about creating a good enough video that accurately depicted my refugee's story, in a manner that was ethically sound, as well as, empowering. Lastly, I wanted to make sure that I created a video that was appealing to my audience. Throughout the course my apprehension began to fade with help from Professor Reynolds, my classmates, and class text.

        When Professor Reynolds announced we would be interviewing refugees our class began broadening our content knowledge about refugee crises. For homework we were asked to read articles and watch videos from all different countries about refugees. When given my specific refugee’s home, I was able to research about Liberia. Using these multimodal forms of writing as contextual knowledge, I was able to gain a considerable background about the Liberian civil war. Information, I certainly had not known before this class. Using this information my group members and I began to make interview questions that we believed would not offend or upset our refugees. During this period my group members and I struggled as we reflected back to our research, realizing that this topic would be difficult to make light for our interviewees. We had to consider our interviewee audience. Several times we discussed and revised our questions.

       During the interview of Ma Sarah, and Mama Sania from Liberia I took handwritten notes so we would have a transcript of the interview other than the video. It was helpful to have two other group members to divide up the responsibilities of the writing process; another group member interviewed, while the other took the video. Walking out of the interview I felt empowered to share the heart-wrenching stories I had just heard.

      More intimidating than the interview itself my group members and I were left with an hour and 20 minutes of material that we needed to make into a short, and empowering video. As a group we took the next step in the writing process; deciding what we wanted to add to our video specifically. We decided that not only did we want to bring awareness to the refugee crisis in Liberia, and the two refugee’s stories, we also wanted to bring awareness to PTSD.

 

       Yes the women went through horrific experiences, but their struggles did not stop when they came to America. They have to live with these memories everyday, for the rest of their lives.

      As discussed in class, my group members and I wanted to create a video that held all the important affordances and elements that drew in the attention of our viewers. As we read in “Out of the Wire”, anecdotes aren’t enough to make a story. A story needs to have an arc where the character changes. The story should show, rather than tell. This being said, when thinking about genre knowledge, my group members and I considered what genre was best for us to share our story that would keep our viewers most engaged. We decided on a video. Secondly, we wanted to make sure we created a dramatic question, something to make our viewer care, ours was: “How does one come back from life, after losing everything they knew?”.

     Keeping in mind our rhetorical knowledge, we wanted to make sure there was emotional content in our video, but also did not want to emotionally manipulate to grab our viewers attention. A couple times throughout the interview our refugees broke down, and cried. We decided to edit out these aspects in respect of Ma Sarah and Mama Sania. The stories would give the viewer enough emotional content to hook them, and want them to keep watching. Thinking about the discourse community of our viewers, we realized that anyone would be able to access this video, and therefore we should not exploit our interviewees. Also, the helped us think about making our video accessible for all viewers; including subtitles, etc.

     The purpose of our video was to share the crisis in Liberia, but more importantly to bring awareness to PTSD. We set up the video so the stories of the two women were in the beginning with a discussion of what they are currently still struggling with because of the crisis. Now that we had the rough set up of our video we then began considering the rhetorical affordances for our video. Our main visual mode of the video would be the interviewees, with a couple of slides with background information of Liberia. Orally, we would here the voices of the women talking, with some somber music in the beginning of the video, and at the end. I felt it necessary to show the women’s faces during the interview because we could see their gestures which added to their spoken words. All of these modes we considered separately to be able to communicate our message effectively.

    Our next step was to add all these aspects together to create our first draft of the video. After we had completed our first draft, we began the editing process. Our class as a whole, gave suggestions of our first draft, then we edited again. Next a couple individuals gave us more suggestions, and then we edited. From here we were on our own, as we metacognitively looked through our video and self-reflected, and once again edited. Our last step was to adhere to appropriate citations, and fair use aspects. We gave credit to those websites we used, music, as well as, gave our thanks to those who helped us with the project all together.

     Overall, I believe our video was an accurate depiction of what we initially wanted it to be. Through each step of the process we were using the knowledge we learned in class, and applying it to our refugee video. Personally, I became a new kind of writer from this class. To think that writing was just pen and paper was ignorant of me. In the future I will be able to apply multimodal to my teaching. As a teacher I can not only use multimodal text to teach my students about certain topics, but I can also ask students to produce multimodal text. One very important thing I will take away and apply to my profession as a teacher is knowing your audience. As a teacher I will have many different audiences that I will need to be mindful of when writing such as colleagues, bosses, children, and parents. Knowing your discourse community is key to understanding how you will write. I will take this information among the plethora of new information I learned and will use it to always be a credible, and well-rounded multimodal writer.

Final Project: Draft 1

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