GARY PAOLUCCI
Gary Paolucci
Final Reflection
A multimodal piece is meant to go beyond the standardized textually based project, diving into different outlets where information can be processed and analyzed universally, ultimately allowing for different perspectives. The purpose of this course was to teach about the different outlets available to use when constructing a multimodal piece, where elements of text, sound, and visuals could be combined from different angles into one centralized message. Through the Quest for Refugee project, we were also given the unique second purpose of learning about the life of a refugee. Using multimodal skills learned in the course, it was our group’s goal to create an accurate project that showcased our refugee’s (Carolina Correa) story, along with the centralized themes she felt needed to be emphasized. In order to portray these themes to the audience, the multimodal approach provided the most effective means to do so. Knowing that our primary target audiences were the refugee community along with uninformed people about refugees, we knew it was important to implement audio, visual, and text perspectives in order for further universality.
With one clear cut discourse community, and another being “the uninformed but looking to be educated”, it was very important for us to be able to illustrate the values and goals of refugees. Such common values of refugees include traits such as independence, courage, motivation, and endurance. The ultimate goals of this discourse community is to help others make similar transitions into foreign countries, raise awareness of refugee issues around the world, and bring out those stated values in others. In order for these values and goals to translate into a universal story, a narrative and genre were key in the creation of this multimodal project.
Unfortunately, outside of the refugee discourse community along with some of the relatively educated about refugee community, there seems to be a general negative stereotype among the general public when “refugee” comes to mind. This could be for a number of reasons, but the media and people's fear of insecurity often stem to be the root cause of it. In the United States, it does not help that the uneducated masses are seeing the current problems arising in Syria, or the rude demeanor that president-elect Donald Trump has said about Mexicans coming in. A great example of a multimodal piece of work is a political cartoon, which paints issues in a visual, mental, and textual perspective.These were the top two political cartoons on Google when typing in “refugee political cartoons”. They both express the United States not wanting to take action due to fears of security and safety. It is important to educate the miseducated to help out those in need; for ethical and humane reasons. “How would you like to be in there shoes”, a common saying, is a message that we need to encode in this video, because the uninformed may not know what there “shoes” actually feel like. We hope that this project will help those who are misinformed about refugees understand that they are just looking for assistance. Creating a project that is relatable to the everyday person is important in trying to accomplish that.
http://thecomicnews.com/images/edtoons/2015/0916/refugees/02.jpg http://thecomicnews.com/images/edtoons/2015/1125/refugees/06.jpg
From a genre perspective, we made a nonfiction multimodal based biography about Carolina Correa. Under the assumption that she was telling us the truth about her life and what other refugees do to promote their cause, we acted ethically in creating this project. We were able to learn about her life story from her perspective, learning so much about her goals and values. We were also able to learn about the overarching goals and values of the refugee community through the entirety of this course. Diving into genre even further, themes implemented through the project included suspense, heroicness, fear, family, trauma, and self-actualization. These themes are relatable to the everyday person, so we thought it would be best to highlight those themes in Carolina’s story. These are also common themes to which a genre is built upon in a story setting. Creating a narrative, it is important that there are developed themes under and overarching genre. A narrative gives the audience a rope to hold on to while going through the journey of the piece. Aspects of character, voice, sounds, visuals helped create a narrative where the story related and developed with the audience. These techniques for creating this “visual narrative” were implemented in this project, with special help from our course text, “Out on the Wire” by Jessica Abel. We were able to take the project step by step as the text broke down the different processes into chapters, from beginning ideas to final editing.
We felt it was important to emphasize the point that Carolina didn’t even think of herself as a refugee before it was brought to her attention. Starting off the video with that segment, it acted as a platform to where the audience learned about Carolina and her story, coming to a coinciding realization about how she is a refugee. From there, the video transitions into an introduction about Carolina, and her story from Columbia to the United States. An important point we wanted to show in the video is that there were the obvious hardships she had to deal with in Columbia, as to with the majority of refugees that have come to the United States. Being a minority in this country, she still deals with persecution to this day. Though as said, the severity levels are much different from her time in Columbia to her current time in the United States. She wanted to emphasize the point of fear, the fear of not knowing if where she was going to live, the fear of losing more of her family, the fear of not living another day. It is living in that constant state of fear that similarly all refugees have gone through. That theme is brought up in the middle of the video, and from there we see a positive transition of Carolina’s immigration to the United States. From there she explains her daily life, and how it has significantly improved since being in the states. She wants to let the audience know though that even though she has a new life certain fears will that originated in Columbia will never go away. Trauma is something that exists among a handful of refugees and by informing others, hopefully they can relate, and we can help refugees live happier lives in the United States.
When finally piecing it together, we had to make certain cuts to our video in order to help centralize Carolina’s message and as well for general time constraints. It was very important for us to not take her words out of context because that would tarnish the genuinity of the project. Presenting a project not accurately portraying what Carolina is sharing with us to the audience would be unethical to not only her but the Quest for Refugee project in general. The purpose of the Quest for Refugee is to answer questions for the audience such as “Why do people flee persecution and armed conflict? What happens to them once they have left their homes, their communities, their countries? Where does their journey take them? Who helps them, and who harms them along their path and when they reach their destination?”, and so on. It was important to not take anything Carolina said out of context because it could have created unintended damage to the project. Knowing the purpose of the project along with guidance from our peers and professor it ultimately helped our group create a well-thought-out multimodal project that did not come in contact with any unethical boundaries.
Not only did I learn about the struggles and triumph that a refugee goes through, but from a course-based standpoint, I learned about the journey an author takes when putting together a multimodal project. There are so many factors that go into a multimodal work, and it was unfamiliar territory that I was glad to have learned about. Rather than if this was a generic five paragraph essay, considerations when putting together a multimodal project are much greater. You have to think about camera angles, when to start/stop recording, lighting, what program to video-edit with, sound editing, music selection, clip transitions, how to add subtitles, while all along with everything you need in a standard narrative piece such as a plot, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, realization, etc. Through video editing and the questions asked in the interview, it was up to my group and I to shape the narrative, and up to Carolina to tell her story. An important lesson learned through this process was that even though we could have created the story by taking Carolina’s words not in the context that she may have intended, we knew from an ethical standpoint that that would not be appropriate. In the world of multimodal writing, you are encoding messages for a wide range of audiences, all decoding the material differently through the different means the author provides. This creates false information for the audience, and only promotes that wrong thinking, as seen with so many people today regarding refugees. We see media outlets such as TMZ and The Daily Express, where though they may have their times of credibility, people still do not feel that everything that they report is one-hundred percent credible. This condones feelings of mistrust and insecurity. This idea also relates to Claire Lauer’s “What’s in a Name”, the anatomy of a definition of “historically situated”. If we do not tell a story right the first time, it will always be remembered for that time where the author did not tell that story right. In the Quest for Refugee project, it was essential that we did not do the refugee community a disservice by taking what they said out of context. Each individual's’ story needed to be told right, and it was merely our job to make their message derived from their story accessible to the audience in a multimodal format.
