REFLECT
on Sam Rodgers – Mid-Semester Break:
Sam Rodgers’ Mid-Semester Break is a multimodal that contains a memoir with photography, video, and a painting. The overall purpose of this piece is to reflect on the year ‘so far’, as in he is taking a break in the middle of a long semester of life school.
First, the tone of the text, it sounds either like a diary, or a letter to the author’s older self. It is light, even the break up sounds delightful, recording every trivial updates in his life, yet for me so crucial for an adult: how he knows how to ask for help as a student, how he finds ‘an apartment a 3 minute walk away from where I am now […] with big kitchen and lots of storage’ and how exciting he is to make a ‘new nest’ for him and the cat. The text is then aided with a stunning photograph of an apartment block in Singapore. The image itself seems overwhelming, crowded and suffocating, but the person in it looking towards the apartment with confidence and even freedom somewhat explains Rodgers’ situation when he wrote this piece: in front of big changes, yet calm and comfortable.
The second part of the piece is the record of the YouTube channels that he is interested in at the time, with the link of the videos embedded. Audience can clearly see the variety of the things he cares about: Tasting History, fashion is pop culture, or far-flung places around the world.
And lastly, a message to the readers, properly including himself, ‘Make Good Work. Eat Good Food. Cry.’ via a painting by artist Sophie Vallance Cantor. This painting sums up Rodgers’ mindset at the point, his vision, his goals to work hard and stay true to himself mentally, which is also shown throughout the piece. His personality oozes through every word choice, photographs, his interest, his optimism, and as an audience I feel like I’m secretly reading someone’s diary. It’s raw, unfiltered, and only via all these text and photos and paintings and videos together, audience can get to know him like a friend.
Rodgers S (2021) Mid-Semester Break, An Odd Geography, accessed 12 March 2023. https://anoddgeography.substack.com/p/mid-semester-break
on Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek – John Branch, The New York Times:
Snow Fall by John Branch is indeed ‘a new era or immersive reading online’. Beside the intriguing storytelling, audience’s engagement with Snow Fall exceeds significantly compared to regular journal articles due to the huge variety of visual media: interview videos, sound, gif, interactive map, slide show of photographs, weather forecast video.
Audience no longer has to scroll through a big chunk of text that is now impossible to focus on in this day and age and is now driven by a click-heavy format that encourage attention to the details that text only cannot portray. For example, Saugstad’s horrified face when thinking back to that moment when she is mummified by the avalanche. ‘I couldn’t breathe’, said Saugstad. The fear has never been more real, the fear no words can describe.
Snow Fall even makes scrolling more interesting. From the gif at the title that disappear when audience start scrolling down, to the geographical map of the Tunnel Creek appears when audience scroll through its introduction and the real satellite moving image of the storm at the end. This mobility is a feast to the eye, while also provide visual information to the according story.
Photographs also play a vital part in this story. Either providing a historical insight of the avalanche in 1910 that killed 96 people and heightened the danger of Cascade Tunnel, or bring a face to the name mentioned which can be a minimal addition but helps so much with audience’s memory and imagination, like an illustrated children book. Not to forget the slide show of photos taken during the night ski recreate the festivity, the excitement of the skiers within the heavy snow better than any words.
The article as a whole is packed with information and insights, is emotional in a lot of ways, but we cannot ignore the effectiveness of the extra media that are used to deliver the story with more depth and details. Even with someone with short attention span, they can scroll pass the long text and stop at any visual element that catches their eyes and already they have an idea of what is going on in that part.
Overall, Snow Fall is a feast for all senses, and I think it is what multimodal is all about.
Branch J (2012) Snow Fall – The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, New York Times, accessed 12 March 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/index.html#/?part=tunnel-creek
Dowling, D. (2019). Multimedia narratives: The “Snow Fall” Revolution and Beyond. In Immersive longform storytelling: Media, technology, audience (New York & London, pp. 28–47). Routledge.
MAKE
Piece 1: Video + Text
The more I work on this piece, the more I agree with the saying ‘less is more’. By putting the subject – the bed, onto the screen, the familiar place for everyone becomes so much more emotional. I did not even try to glamourize the shot, and kept it how I usually view the bed, how everyone usually views their bed, as to give the bed a meaning: it contains your emotions, you learnt how to cry yourself to sleep, I learnt how to hold my tears.
Additionally, the video captures how the sun sets with the bed, making light the only movement, yet it fits with change of emotion within the text. This combination is so small yet so powerful in creating a drama in the piece without going too deep in the visual.
Piece 2: Sound + Sculpture
Audio Player
This is an unfinished piece, however, it is still an idea that I really want to perform later in this course.
I was thinking of how to be creative with multimodal and not trap myself with just video, or still images. So, I wanted to try the medium of space, which I found to be the most powerful one to evoke emotions in audience. I want audience to be able to lay down on a bed, feel the real coziness, the warmth, as they listen to the soundtrack of the narrator telling the story of my past. I guess all I wanted to do was emphasizing the contrast between the surrounding and the conversation, how polarized the temperature is and therefore audience can figure out how painful it is.