Final Reflection 

 

 

During the Fall, 2016 semester at Roger Williams University, I took Writing 321, multimodal writing, to fulfill a course requirement. Multimodal writing is aimed to effectively communicate in various ways to a number of different audiences. The five different modes are visual, oral, gestural, spatial, and linguistic. Media, such as a website, is the main outlet used for communication by way of text, audio, and image. Throughout my time in this class, we worked on a Community Storytelling Project, which was a video project. This project was centered around the Quest for Refuge. We were put into groups and assigned a community member who is either a refugee or has a parent who was a refugee. My partner and I were assigned to work with Ma Esther, who came from Libera as a refugee due to the civil war. We did not meet our community partner until the day that we were scheduled to interview with her. Leading up to this point, we came up with a list of questions that we could ask Ma Esther about her journey. We also had some time to play around with our video cameras to ensure we would know how to work it on interview day. Upon meeting Ma Esther we quickly learned how wonderful she is and how easy it was to talk to her. At the beginning of the interview, I asked her to introduce herself and she immediately said that she would answer any question. From there, I asked if there was anything in particular that she wanted to talk about and she went right into telling us about her life. We barely even had to ask the questions that we came up with prior, which was great. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When creating any piece it is necessary to know who your audience will be. It is important to make sure that the audience can easily understand the point that you are trying to get across and that the audience will remain interested. A chapter from Out on the Wire made it a point to discuss the importance of paying attention to the audience. The audience for this video project is ultimately the community members and Roger Williams University students, in addition to some faculty. It was important to make sure that we were presenting our community member in an empowering way that effectively told her story. When someone is allowing you to document and share their personal life, it is important to remain ethical, even if you do not think you are being unethical. By editing, or cutting in or out footage, can become tricky because as the creator you do not want to make it seem as though the person is saying something that they are not. 

 

 

When creating the final video we had free range to edit it how we pleased, as far as adding in audio, text, and images. The video that my partner and I created has multiple music pieces throughout and one of those is culturally specific to our community member.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our video also includes an on screen textual definitions and a few images that relate to the Liberian culture being talked about. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before meeting and interviewing Ma Esther, I needed to do research to obtain some background information on the country that she came from in order to go into this experience with some knowledge and understanding of what she would be talking about. 

 

Throughout this process, I learned a lot about video editing, how to conduct an interview, and how to effectively tell another person’s story. One of my favorite pieces that we looked at in class to learn about editing was "The Olive Project." I liked this piece because I had never seen a website setup in this way, so I enjoyed that it was different. It also helped me to see that editing and the use of multimodal elements can be done in many ways and that it certainly does not have to be traditional in order to convey a message. Out On the Wire provided me with many editing tips that were important to how I would create this video. Between making this video project and creating a website throughout this fall semester, I learned how to create work with multimodal elements, which I did not have much prior knowledge to. I now have an understanding of the various ways to communicate effectively and just how helpful it is to have these different modes to use as tools.