"Seeing The World Through Multimodal Glasses"

Just like Marshall McLuhan emphasized that the “medium is the message,” I felt that Megan Fulwiler and Kim Middleton emphasized in their article “After Digital Storytelling: Video Composing in the New Media Age,” that the medium is the composing and revision process. In other words, the medium you use to create your project influences the composing and revising choices you end up making. They draw on the work of scholars such as Jeff Rice, Alex Reid, Lev Manovich, and Jason Ranker to argue the point that “to make new media is to enact new methods of composing that are specific to new forms” (43). Furthermore, in the new media age, “composing across and among modalities is not a series of discrete stages, but rather a multiplying recursive and iterative process” (46). Fulwiler and Middleton believe that using the alphabetic process of prewrite/write/rewrite to guide a filmmaking process towards the steps of script/film/edit is shortsighted. In fact, when filmmakers rely on the alphabetic principles, they miss the possibility of “alternate paradigms” and “a synchronous, dynamic, and simultaneous act of composing with a variety of modes” (41, 42). It is not enough to call a multimodal assignment multimodal and then revert to using the same kinds of processes for composing and revising as you would with an alphabetic text.

What does your composing and revising process look like?

Since our multimodal assignments (the infographic and the video) both stem from a written teaching philosophy statement, I hope to avoid the same problems that Katie encountered in her video project by depending too heavily on the alphabetic text. However, I still worry that I might end up falling victim to some of the things Katie did such as “mode-matching” images with the actual text (47). After reading this article, I anticipate that I will engage to some extent in the processes of recursivity and compositing that Fulwiler and Middleton mention, perhaps arriving at new, insightful conclusions. As Fulwiler and Middleton note, there is an opportunity when making a film or video to find “new modes of communication, new means of self-presentation, and new kinds of stories” (48). As a novice filmmaker, I am both excited and nervous to embark on a “process of discovery” where I will “make a variety of decisions about images, sounds, and texts, and constantly address the effects that these create when synthesized” (48). I am comforted that I have the alphabetic teaching philosophy statement to guide my thinking during this process, but I know that some of that comfort will dissipate as I feel the need to remix or “recalibrate” parts of that original statement throughout filmmaking (46). Furthermore, the fact that I have never made a film does make me feel ambivalent. Despite my feelings, I am ready for the challenge and curious about how I can apply my own experiences to the multimodal projects for students in my classroom.

The long and winding road of film revision