Behind the Scenes of “Calling Nowhere Home: Third Culture Kid (an Autoethnography of Annette Barlie)”

Compared to the familiar medium of writing a paper, making a video for project four at first seemed like a daunting task. Most members of our group haven’t had a lot of experience with video composition. Making the change from working as an individual to working as a group on this project went surprisingly smoothly. However, as both a video and a group project there were a variety of different challenges that we had that were different from previous projects. There was a need for communication, splitting up work, and finding time to get together. By combining our skillsets and working together, we were able to successfully complete the project to portray Annette’s experiences as a third culture kid through audio, visuals, and rhetoric.

Despite these differences, project four still utilized many of the skills learned in past projects. In translating Annette’s autoethnography to film, we still had to focus on maintaining her thesis and answering “so what?” For the most part, we were able to take arguments directly out of her paper while writing the script. Annette’s scholarly sources were not difficult to incorporate, and we managed to cite them verbally in the script and also on the screen with text, so that viewers could tell where the information was coming from. We did add several scenes and examples, many of which we acted out in an attempt to add pathos; if viewers of our video could see Annette’s expressions and TCK-specific struggles acted out, they might better understand how it feels to be a third culture kid. Having filmed scenes was also a way to mix-up our project and have it become more than just a slideshow of photos with Annette talking in the background. We answered the “so what” at the end of our project when Annette mentions that globalization is leading to more youth living as TCKs.

As a group, we quickly decided that the best way to communicate with each other was to set up a group text. We swapped numbers and met before the end of the first week to start breaking up tasks. Before finalizing this project, we met a total of five times. Some of these meetings were more productive–one of the keys to successful group work is physically meeting. Being able to look at what work had been done together let us better decide who would be in charge of what tasks. One problem we had was that we didn’t want to take away Annette’s voice or add anything to the project’s script that wouldn’t honestly reflect her experience, so it was difficult for us to add a new point of views to the life of a TCK. This resulted in Annette playing a vital role in every step so that we could maintain the integrity of her autoethnography as we translated it into a new medium. Looking back, this helped us make the conclusion that having a leader to keep everyone in check and overlooking all the aspects of the project is extremely positive because it keeps everyone accountable.

Another point of difficulty in this project was finding a way to incorporate imagery. Although we were able to find pictures–either from the internet, drawn by Clara, or taken by Annette–it did take a lot of thinking to determine ways we could visually represent her story. We went through the whole script, and added potential imagery with every line. Originally, the plan was to have many more drawings, but we soon realized that pictures would look more polished when paired with our filmed video clips. So through experimentation and patience, we were able to find imagery that worked best with our vision for our video.

Overall, we all enjoyed converting the written autoethnography to a video. It allowed us to express our creative side and make the end of the semester a little more fun. Having the autoethnography as a video also allows it to appeal to a greater audience. The video allows more people to quickly and easily understand Annette’s story and why it matters.

However, even though it was fun to convert it to a video, it was a little difficult to put it together. Tucker had some trouble editing the video and compiling all of the clips into a finished product. Thankfully, Annette was able to help finish the editing process. This further emphasises the importance of group work, even for things that seem individualized like editing.

Through teamwork, we were able to combine ideas and improve on them. It is always better when there are multiple brains working together. For example, when we were trying to film scenes, we weren’t always sure about how to act them out. We tried it one way, but then that didn’t work so we added on someone else’s ideas to portray a story through our acting. This collaboration and sharing of ideas really helped polish our video.

The workshop sessions we had in class were very helpful in order to see what approaches other groups were taking, and gave us ideas on how to improve our video. We admired how Nick’s group used drawings to describe the pasta making process, and we ended up incorporating a drawing in our video as well.

This project was also a good overall learning experience. We learned how to work better with a group, how to respect others’ ideas, Tucker and Annette learned to edit on iMovie, and how to convert a paper with a scholarly audience to a video with a popular audience. I hope in the future we can do more of these types of projects to really show how college writing can be transformed into different types of media.

In terms of script writing, Annette was surprised at how she ended up taking on the process as well as how time consuming it was. Before she started adapting her autoethnography into a script, she thought that it was going to be a simple copy and paste from the original autoethnography. However, Annette soon realized that this would not be the case. When she first did that and read it out allowed to the other group members, we all noted that it sounded way too formal and not appropriate for our audience. What Annette found herself doing instead was taking the main points from the original essay, and changing the wording so that it was more “casual” and appropriate for the audience.

In some cases she found that she wasn’t following the original essay at all, as there was a little more creative freedom when adapting it for the on-screen experience. An example of this would be the part of the video when we act out someone asking Annette where she’s from, and she expresses her specific answers while holding up her different passports. Although this specific scene wasn’t in Annette’s original autoethnography, she found that adding it to the script for the video would captivate the audience. Because there was a lot of creative freedom with script writing, she found that it took a couple of hours to write it. However, after those hours Annette felt as though the script had a good balance of expressing the true meaning of being a TCK, sources, and most importantly catering to a more popular audience rather than sociologists.

Deciding who did what started to develope as we worked on the project. When we first met, it became clear that Annette should be the one adapting the original autoethnography into a script because she would have the most insights on TCKs as well as the important aspects that must be portrayed. From there, Clara took on the role of indicating what visual elements would go with the specific part of the script, as that is something she has had experience with in the past. However, Jack, Tucker, and Annette would also give input on this matter whenever we saw fit. Jack took on the main role of doing the APA sources, as he has had experience doing this before with other projects. When it came to editing, Tucker took on this role for a couple of reasons. Firstly, he has a Mac and therefore can use iMovie which on our opinion, is the best editing software. Secondly, he is the most comfortable out of all of us for editing. However, towards the end Annette also took on the role of editor because she had extra photos/video footage that would work really well to exemplify what it means to be a TCK. For example, she had video footage on her computer of the kids wrestling in Mongolia, as well as video of some of her travels.

We used multiple different types of media in our video to portray the autoethnography of a TCK. Using video with acting to portray certain scenes definitely seemed to be a hit with the people in our class that saw our video because the scene could help them visualize in a better way what actually happened with Annette and her experience into the world of a TCK. Along with videos of us acting scenes out, we used still images with recordings over it to give the eyes something to focus on, but with the main focus to be on the words being said. There were some black screens to emphasize on the words. This seemed to portray a more serious undertone to the piece which was refreshing after certain humorous acting scenes. We believe that our use of media definitely helped us to get our point across and show through visuals how Annette ventured into the world of Third Culture Kids and what affect that has had on her life.

Although there were difficulties to overcome with this new kind of media and project, we think that through our different levels of creativity and skills we were able portray Annette’s TCK story. However, like everything in life, there is still plenty of room for improvement. Firstly, although roles were created, we think there should have been more equal delegations. Delegations were hard because there were natural leaders in our group, but a more structured role for each person would have been more helpful in the long run so that everyone could have a clear and distinct idea of what needs to be done. There are also aspects of this project that can be taken into consideration for helping us in the future. We have all come to the consensus that we learned how to adapt something as rigid as an autoethnography for sociologists, for a more popular audience. In essence, we have learned to listen, think, and adapt for our audience. This will help us in whatever we decide to do in our future because audience is key when making a presentation, writing a paper, giving a speech, or simply interacting with people.

Annette Barile, Clara Ilkka, Jack Schofield, and Tucker Sharpe