Creative Process/Multimodal Use

 

Introduction

By definition, a multimodal text is communicating your ideas and writing through two or more different platforms. These platforms include textual, visual, audio and oral. Creating a project using multimodal methods allows the creator to trigger different emotions and create a better understanding of the topic at hand. Multimodal writing also creates a more dynamic piece, which allows the reader/listener/viewer to feel more engaged and welcome to the topic.

For the community connections project, we created a video of our interview with Democratic Republic of Congo refugee, Clement Shabani. Clement has lived in Providence, Rhode Island for over ten years and is a strong advocate of women’s rights as well as education for refugees in the United States after they have been resettled. Our video is a little over eight minutes long and has many different features that make it a unique multimodal piece.

 

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?

Before the day of our interview, we went through a long preparation process. We needed to research our interviewee; Where is he from? What sort of conflict transpired? What is the country like now? How do we address someone in this culture? What is appropriate/inappropriate? To help with some of the latter questions, we were fortunate to have a conversation with Syrian refugee Sana Mustafa and Cambodian refugee Chanda Womack. These women are advocates and have experience speaking with other refugees as well as being interviewed by people from local reporters to the United Nations. We were able to acquire some insight on things such as making sure they are comfortable, words to avoid, and knowing what to do if things became too emotionally difficult for the refugees.

Fortunately for our group, Clement was willing to speak about everything he has been through. From his advocacy for women’s rights in the Congo to his escape and eventual relocation to Rhode Island, we were lucky to get so much useful and amazing information from Clement. Having such great footage made it difficult for us to condense our video during the beginning drafts. Attempting to create a flow without taking out too much was the hardest part. However, in the end, we were able to connect three main parts of the interview together; Clement escape and reason for leaving, advocacy of women’s rights, and finally the importance of refugee children and their education in their new schools.

 

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?

On the title slide, we decided to leave a black background with the title of our piece, “Clement Shabani, Conflict in the Congo”, along with audio of Clement speaking in the back. With only audio and no visual representation of Clement at first, we believed it would be a great way for the viewer to imagine what Clement would look like. For many people, hearing the word refugee, they associate the person with being dirty, homeless, sad, or unhealthy. For most refugee’s this is not the case. So, our main goal was to surprise those who have these negative stereotypes in their heads by just giving the audio, then introducing what Clement looks like.

After the title slide and before the introduction of Clement, we created two textual slides and one photo slide to illustrate a few main points we wanted our viewers to understand prior to hearing Clement’s story. With light and low music in the background, viewers got to read two brief synopses of the history of the DRC as well as seen on a map where the DRC is in Africa. Finally, as the words faded to black and the music lowered, we were introduced to Clement Shabani. For the remainder of the video, we kept it simple leaving the emotion of Clement’s words and his gestures to shine through the screen and help him tell the story. We did not want to complicate the audio by adding more background music. By keeping the music to the beginning and the end, this created a start and finish for the viewers. In the end with the introduction of the music, people understand that the video is preparing to end.

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 this video is no different.

 

What theoretical and/or ethical consideration of writing for public audiences guided your work in this project? How?

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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?