Overview

For this project, you will compose a multimodal remix with archival footage accompanied by a memo that explains your choices and goals during your composing process.

In short, this project enables you to think carefully about the modes and genre that would be most fitting for a rhetorical situation (either one you identify or one of the options below) and to compose with those chosen modes and genre to achieve a purpose and impact an audience. The ability to make such writerly decisions and execute a multimodal project in response to a rhetorical situation will be invaluable in your college career and likely even more so in your professional life.

The purposes of this assignment are: to practice making writerly decisions based on affordances and constraints of modalities; to continue practicing using genre and rhetorical awareness to guide your writing process; to practice using a range of multimodal rhetorical tools that best accommodate your genre and rhetorical situation; to create a piece of writing that is imaginative, creative and matters to you; and to add more strategies to your growing rhetorical toolbox.

Writing Task

In 2011, a bunch of professors got together and created remixes that included some footage from the 1936 film called Master Hands. While all of them used this footage in their remixes, none of them did so in the same way. They each combined and transformed this footage, with other assets, in a unique way to convey something different from the original.

We’ll do the same activity as the aforementioned professors, but with footage/material from one video from the archive of Coronet Instructional films. (The educational videos in this archive were played for high school students in the U.S. from the 1940s through the 1960s.) Like the professors, we will create a remix using this footage and other material, or in the words of Kirby Ferguson, we will copy, transform, and combine existing materials to make something new.

The class will be divided into multiple groups. Each group will decide on one video to use for the project. Students will individually work with that video material and other assets to create a multimodal remix using any combination of modes in any genre for their chosen purpose and audience. Click here for a list of genres you may consider. If that freedom of choice is overwhelming, you can create a multimodal remix project in response to one of the below rhetorical situations.

Rhetorical Situation #1: Imagine you are working for a company that currently creates instructional material for high school students. The common ways they deliver instructional material is via their podcast “Learning in the 21^st Century,” videos (like Coronet Instructional Films), and brochures. Your job is to take up your chosen material (in the form of moving visuals with audio, only audio, and/or photographs of stills) to teach adolescents today about a larger concept (like feminism, democracy, capitalism, equality, discrimination, or patriarchy, for example) using an educational genre that the company commonly uses or a genre the company doesn’t normally use but would make good sense for a 21^st century learner.

Rhetorical Situation #2: You work at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, and are contributing to an exhibit that makes arguments or critiques about a current social, cultural, or political issue, a recent topic of conversation, or a problem that exists in this country. Your job is to take up this footage and present your argument or critique as a video, audio, or non-digital multimodal project. Your project will be one of ten other projects in the exhibit, each of which focuses on a different issue, conversation, or problem. The exhibit is called “ArtRAGE.”

Assignment Details

Part #1: Multimodal Project Details

1. You should use the shared asset in a way that is substantial and transformative.
2. You should draw on a range of sources to inform the creation of your project (the kind of sources will depend on the nature and genre of the project).
3. You should use a range of assets in combination with your footage (in most circumstances). Such assets may include interviews, news clips, images, stills, photographs, etc (the number and kind of asset will depend on the nature and genre of the project).
4. You cannot use language word for word in your project unless you are excerpting parts from the original source.
5. All the material used in your project must be in the public domain, have a Creative Commons license, or be royalty-free. Students are permitted to use copyrighted material if it falls under the fair use exemption.

Part #2: Memos of Goals and Choices

You will compose a 2-3 page single-spaced memo of goals and choices (MGC) that explains your process of drafting and revising your multimodal remix project. You’ll use it to prove that you made deliberate and strategic decisions when composing your project with regard to your purpose, genre, audience, context, and modalities. Suggested memo headings are: Overall, Rhetorical Context, Modalities, Multimodal Rhetorical Strategies. Also include full APA citations for sources used in the audio project.