Check out this mockumentary-style movie I made for my final project!

As I labored over this short film, I was pleasantly surprised to see everything I've learned this term in Writing 8 come together. I got to take all my observations about what constitutes a cohesive, well-done composition, combine that knowledge with the editing skills I've acquired, and end up with one final product.

The road to that final product was a bumpy one. I had promising ideas in mind, yet I struggled to bring those ideas to life. Since I chose to go home for a family member's graduation the weekend before the project was due, I left myself little time to film. I had prepared a general storyboard-type outline. I wrote a loose script. I had strong visions and ambitions. But it was Monday of finals week and difficult to recruit actors. Under high pressure, I ended up shooting all of the scenes in one day. My friend Matthew was incredibly helpful; I cast him as the main character and he had some terrific input. He would stray from the script, coming up with funny lines or doing something ridiculous on the spot, and I think that those candid moments really added to the end product.

Given my limited time and resources, I obviously encountered challenges. For instance, when I sat down to edit the film and played back the scenes I shot outside,  I realized that the audio quality was often compromised by the sound of a lawn-mower I hadn't really noticed while I was filming. I didn't have time to do another round of takes, so the editing process proved exhaustive, working long and hard to remedy what I had. I stayed up all night doing everything in my power make the very best of the limited footage. Considering these hurdles, I think the final product turned out pretty well. I deliberated over the smallest details, from jump cuts to sound effects to even removing unwanted laughter from the background by muting small segments, copying unobtrusive audio from another portion of that segment, and superimposing it onto the problem area of the clip.

All in all, despite the stress and the excruciating editing, I thoroughly enjoyed working with different media to make this little movie. It's got quite a few views on YouTube, which is inspiring. I may just make another!

Check out this remix of Lyndon B. Johnson's speech, The American Promise !

For this project, I challenged myself to think outside of the box. Or, at least, redefine the box. I wanted to reshape it. In the end, I the shape I chose was that of the human body.

By setting my map within the shape of a human anatomy diagram, my rhetorical focus shifted from geographical accuracy to symbolism. In the “How to Look at a Map” chapter of James Elkins’ Your Eyes, Elkins discusses an old Buddhist map. The cartographer, he explains, used symbolism in that he showed the islands perceived to be inferior as cracking off of the “egg” of the Southern Continent (Elkins 127). Similarly, I wanted my map to be representational, to convey meaning about different places on the Dartmouth campus. “Where” became less important than “what.” My map thus echoes the “unorthodox arrangement” (Elkins 126) of pre-modern maps, unbound by latitude and longitude. To me, this lack of rigidity actually complements what I envision the purpose of my map of Dartmouth to be. I wanted my map to provide a new and interesting way to think about Dartmouth spaces.

Specifically, I chose to draw different sections of and buildings on campus within specific parts of the human body in order to represent the functions of those spaces (based on the functions of the corresponding body parts). The brain, knowledge center, houses the academic buildings, while the brain stem, which supports the nervous system, contains the major support centers on campus, form the Center of Professional Development to Carson, where the Undergraduate Deans’ offices are located. The stomach contains all of the places to eat on campus, the liver, the part of the body responsible for eliminating toxins, is where I drew the religiously affiliated buildings, and the digestive system is where I put all of the residential buildings, because to me, dorms are where students go to process their days and digest what they learned. The green is the heart because I see it as the heart of campus, the fraternities located on the male genitalia to show that they are male-dominated spaces. And so on.

I obviously sacrificed cartographical practicality for creativity. In the words of Elkins, “the map is a compromise, like any map” (128). My map would not be incredibly useful to someone who’s never been to Dartmouth and is trying to find his or her way around. Again, though not accurately scaled, my map is as accurate as possible within the reach of the theme I chose. For example, all of the academic buildings on campus happen to be located pretty close to one another and north of the green, and so when I drew them in the brain, I transposed the exact shapes of the buildings and their locations relative to one another. The Hop and the gym are still to the right of the green, Thayer and Tuck still to the left. Although all of the residence halls are not located south of the green in actuality, within the digestive tract on my map, I placed them with respect to one another according to their relative positions on campus. I tried to preserve as much spatial accuracy as possible after grouping each type of space.

Despite its limitations, I feel that the unique interpretation, bright colors, and use of as much multimodality as I could think to incorporate (I placed Foco cookie crumbs along the esophageal pathway leading into the stomach, spilled some left over cough medicine I got from Dick’s House in the lungs, where I decided to locate the medical institutions, etc), helped make my map literally “come alive.” I had a lot of fun with this project (almost as much as the amount of time I spent drawing it 😉 )

Check out my first-ever podcast here! (please excuse the generic flower photo; I needed to add an image in order upload the file from iMovie).

Reflection:

When I first took on this project, I really had no specific ideas in mind. I knew I wanted my podcast to be as authentic as possible, as much my own creation as it could possibly be. I wanted to work primarily with sounds that I personally recorded, so I spent a lot of time simply walking around with an audiorecorder, all the while unsure of how my recordings would coalesce. I began carrying the recorder with me everywhere, stretching my arms towards the tops of trees to capture the chirping of birds in the morning, whipping it out as motorcyles drove by, as dogs barked, as someone ran past me in flip flops. Eventually, I realized that voices, too, count as sounds. I decided to try recording a conversation amongst my friends while we ate lunch outside on the green. I placed the recorder in the middle of the circle, and eventually everyone more or less forgot it was there and resumed candid conversations. This ended up providing me with substantial material for my final product, after hours of playing the audio back and splicing up the conversation into small segments that I thought represented some of the attitudes of Dartmouth students’ during spring.

In terms of rhetorical devices, my entire podcast obviously relied immensely on exemplification. Initially, I set up the task of determining what spring at Dartmouth sounds like, then provided examples in the form of a compilation of sounds I recorded. After my into and a reading of an e.e.cummings poem about spring, I divided the second half of my podcast into two main segments. The first consisted of examples of some generic sounds of spring that I recorded on campus (no vocals), while the second provided examples of things Dartmouth students might say on a spring day.

I implemented music into my podcast in a few different ways, drawing upon the different planes on which we listen to music (as explained by Heidi McKee in her article). Because I crafted my podcast in the style of a radio show, I used upbeat break-beats preceding the intro, following the outro, and during transitions between segments. These served the “sheerly musical” plane in that they contributed to the movement and structure of the piece. During my spoken intro and outro, on the other hand, I layered some happy music onto the background in order to set a specific tone for the piece, thus entering the “expressive plane.” In the section following the poem reading, which I used to introduce the composition of sounds coming next, I chose to use a different instrumental than the one used during the intro and outro. To me, it still sounded like spring, but simultaneously invoked a slightly more inquisitive tone, which I thought complemented the questions I asked.

Arguably, however, I did not need to introduce the sounds using my voice as much as I did. In imitating something along the lines of a radio show or This American Life, I focused on my vocal delivery quite a bit. I tried to channel my inner radio host and many of my transitions involved vocal segways. My voice did a lot of explicit arguing, or at least explicitly laid out everything I was hoping to cover, orienting readers in a very specific way and thus perhaps limiting their interpretations. In another version of this project, I may have let the sounds speak for themselves a bit more. Choosing to read a poem and then have a spoken transition afterwards took a lot of time – listeners don’t actually hear the “sounds of spring” I collected until about a third of the way into the podcast.

Again, I think that the use of break-beats and the way that I delivered certain lines vocally (e.g., goooood morning Dartmouth!) clearly indicated that my piece was attempting to imitate a radio genre. The theme of spring is explicit in so many ways, from my spoken words to the music I chose to the sounds I selected.

Composing a piece to be heard rather than read is more difficult than one might assume. Although you may have more liberty in some avenues of expression (trying to convey a particular sound in writing is difficult), the editing process is exhaustive. I had to be very deliberate and precise in order to give the piece the exact feel I wanted it to have. In addition, I ran into a lot of technical difficulties. I began making the composition on iMovie, only to realize that I could not layer multiple sound tracks, as I wanted to during the intro and outro. I had to adjust and create those parts separately in Garage Band, save them as iTunes songs, and import them into iMovie. Likewise, I would spend what felt like and eternity listening to a thirty-minute conversation, cutting out all the little phrases I wanted to use, and then line them all up in order to form a semi-cohesive whole. Occasionally, after adding more and more snippets to the specific arrangement, I would play the podcast through and realize that the new clips I’d added had replaced some others, so I’d have to listen to the entire original mp3 again, re-locate those portions, re-cut them, and re-arrange them. When I finally got everything there and together, I had to listen to my almost-final product again and again to assure that it flowed, that it sounded as seamless as it could given the time constraints. To be honest, I think that I could’ve taken another two weeks to finish this project. There are so many little things I noticed during the editing process that I simply did not have the time to redo or add or change.

Overall, the podcast assignment was a satisfying challenge. It was a learning experience, both fun and stressful. It definitely inspired me to continue playing with sound and to keep working on my vocal delivery, which is impeccable not only to projects like this one but to presentations, speeches, interviews, and more.

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Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful - John Maeda

Composing this piece posed many challenges. Before I could even take a stance on whether or not Dartmouth is diverse and begin putting a visual argument together, I had to decide for myself what diversity means. Originally I spent a lot of time assessing the college's statistical makeup, the stagnant admissions quotas, the stereotypical "preppy whiteness" that seems to dominate our campus. The numbers seemed to tell a pretty clear story. However, as I reflected more and more on my still-young Dartmouth experience, my position began to shift. I forgot about the impersonal charts and percentages and began to think about the actual people I've met. I've met a lot of different people. I've met people whose backgrounds differ from my own. People with different attitudes, different religious affiliations, different talents and interests. I began to realize that while Dartmouth may not be the most diverse place imaginable on numerical ethnic or socioeconomic scales, it is remarkably diverse to me.

Before Dartmouth, I attended an all-girls Catholic school. There were sixty-two girls in my graduating class. Five of them were black. Two were hispanic. One was Jewish. Not one was openly associated with any sexual orientation other than heterosexual (despite the lack of boys).

At this school, there weren't many options in terms of specialized classes. Uniforms were required and prayers were said every morning.  I can't recall a single non-white faculty member.

Thus, my high school was comparatively far less diverse than Dartmouth. While differences were respected and individuality encouraged, the community was generally very homogenous. Some may hold a similar view of Dartmouth, but I'm primed to see it differently based on my prior, even narrower experience. Dartmouth has exposed me to far more variety than I'd ever really experienced. At Dartmouth, I have friends who aren't females and who aren't straight and who aren't Catholic. I've met people from all over the place geographically, all of whom harbor unique interests, offer distinct talents, and provide their own perspectives on the world.

That's what it all comes down to, right? Perspective. From my perspective, Dartmouth is a diverse place.

Another huge challenge this assignment presented was its restrictiveness. Just five Power Point slides? How can anyone make a super effective argument on such a broad topic in just five not-too-cluttered slides? Power Point is an extremely limiting medium in that it demands static pictures, denies the use of sound, and urges for as little text as possible so as to retain viewers' attention spans (as per the useful tips mentioned in the TEDx talk we listened to in class).  I tried to incorporate some of these tips into my own Power Point, such as using a dark background to cater to peoples' affinity for contrast.

That said, I suppose this challenge had benefits in that it forced me to stick with one opinion and prioritize the most important facets of my argument. Though I felt frustrated and confined while composing this project, I'm glad that I was able to test my Power Point skills and try to embrace a "less is more" approach. And hey, we wouldn't be respecting the diversity of media if we neglected Power Point, now would we?

A visual essay