My Process for Composing with Different Mediums and Modes

In this post, I will elaborate on my composing process for the various projects in this class that required using different mediums and modes. I generally limited myself to only a couple of software platforms for the creation of my projects. I’ve been using MovieMaker since high school (although not very well, if I’m to be honest), so I felt most comfortable with that program to create my videos. I did expand my understanding of the program and actually updated it halfway through the semester, so I got a lot out of it. As I hope this post can demonstrate, I also learned how to communicate using different media and modes of expression and learned how to better draft and revise multimedia projects. I know that I can take with me as a graduate student in composition and rhetoric.

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As a writing and rhetoric major and a writing center tutor, I feel that I understand a decent amount of communication strategies, and after taking this course, I can add digital communication to my communication repertoire. It's not all that different from written communication, really. As I've been talking about a lot on this blog, there are similar rhetorical strategies for each mode. You're always appealing to your audience and predicting how they might react to your product, and as you go about making your product (written or digital), you also follow a clear drafting and revision process. 

Indeed, one of the most valuable takeaways from this class for me is learning how to organize and manage my drafts and revisions. I'm fairly organized when I write papers, and I usually have both a digital copy and a printed out version of my various drafts. That's naturally different with digital storytelling, though. When creating my video story (which was an eventual part of my research-based digital story project), I had various drafts of my video at different stages of the composing process (see below).

Whenever I finished a “complete” version of the video, I saved it as a draft; whenever I made substantial changes to a video that in turn made it seem unique in its own right, I created a new version (see the examples below of drafts 1 and 3A).

Draft 1

vs.

Draft 3A

In these two drafts, the biggest change that you can see is the shift from voiceover-focused (the audio tracks dominating Draft 1) and video-focused (less audio used in Draft 3A). When I first started my video story, I envisioned myself using my professor’s voiceover (and my own) to narrate and situate my story. I had the files and had the ideas, but even in my other drafts (Draft 1A and Draft 1B, pictured below), it still didn’t feel right.

Draft 1A

Draft 1B

As you can see, Draft 1A still had some voiceover material toward the end there whereas Draft1B started to drift away from that format (though was still very much incomplete). I feel that this project in particular best showcases my composing process because, as with most projects, I change my mind halfway through creating it and completely change directions (just look back at Draft 1 compared to Draft 3A. Total opposites, right?). I always have an ideal version of a paper/project/presentation in my head and then end up adapting that example as I go along. This is of course a typical method that I employ with all projects, but in this class particular with all of the different modes and media going on, I had to be extra careful to document my experience or to at least understand where I was coming from when composing everything.

Indeed, even when I change the direction of a project, I keep the previous drafts saved so that I can look back at them and remember where I wanted to go, what ended up happening, and why I ultimately decided to shift gears. I was more unorganized during the process of my image story (see below; I just had a collection of pictures assembled in my folders and saved different MP4 and WMV files instead of having established drafts in MovieMaker). I learned from this rather sloppy organization, though, as evidenced by my aforementioned meticulous structure of my video story. In a way, then, my composing process transformed just like the actual projects themselves.

Image Story Draft 1

Image Story Revision

It was slightly different for my audio story since I had all the raw audio files ordered to remind me of where I was going with the idea (see below), but in the end, I still organized my data and my ideas in a strategic manner. I also didn’t revise this project (which meant less versions to keep track of), but I did edit the original Audacity track without saving new drafts, which is an approached I changed when making my video story.

Audio Story Files

Regarding my research-based digital story, it was harder to keep track of my drafting since the final product (a blog post) wasn’t something that I could save multiple drafts of. I suppose I could have saved every update and draft as its own blog post, but that would have made the overall blog look messy, so I opted to just update the post each time I revised it. In the beginning I put a rough version of my video story up along with a Create and Share video with the intention of changing it, but I still really wanted to make it look neat and clean, even in the early drafts. In her response to my Create and Share post, Paige said that “it look[ed] very professional,” and Greg added that “with all the text, videos, and links” that I had in my blog, the overall product “[felt] as though it ha[d] been around for a while,” so that was very encouraging. I knew then to not change up too much relating the layout and to focus more on the content, which in this case, was the two videos and the actual writing of the blog.

In her response to my Create and Share, Paige also wondered “if the picture at the top was something you chose or if it just came with the template” and said that “[she] couldn't really tell exactly what it was so maybe think about changing it,” so I indeed changed my picture from the one with the template to a picture of my textbook from Montreal (to add both a “study abroad/school” feel and add some authenticity to the post). I also messed around with the colors and went with white text on a dark background instead of the reverse, and from there, my revisions mainly concerned the video story, which was detailed above.

In the end, then, my composing process using different mediums and modes has evolved tremendously throughout this course. I started off disorganized with my image story, organized yet draft-limited with my audio story, and then organized and draft-happy with my video story.

Looking forward, even though I'm not yet exactly sure where I will end up in the field of composition and rhetoric, I know that in the fall, I may end up taking a digital editing class with Tim Lockridge. WRT 233 was my only digital media course at OU, so I hope to be able to build from my budding skill set to more thoroughly learn how to communicate and compose in a digital matter, which has thus far proven to be very similar to the written composing process that I know so well.