Reflection on Project 4: Multimedia Writing about Political Science

Our final project together presented the three of us with the challenge to adapt an academic essay into a video geared toward a public audience. Though we were building off of Project three, at least two of us would have to take on a completely new project. As a group we chose to use Scott’s case study of Dr. Peter Siavelis, a comparative politics writer, and produce a video that would speak to the qualitative/quantitative divide within the discipline of Political Science. This process was rough, including having to scrap an entire draft of a video to start over for our final submission. The toughest part wasn’t the content, or being able to simplify concepts for the audience, but the actual technical process of creating/editing a video that would be aesthetically pleasing as well as substantive in regards to information. Together, we continued to revise our strategy for producing this video, until we finally were able to come out from the trenches, and admire what we were able to produce. Of course, no project is perfect. Certainly, we could continue to find things to revise within our video. However, due to the rhetorical constraints of our class submission deadline, we had to part with this project and make it vulnerable to the view of multiple audiences.

The first attempt to produce the video, did not go so well for us. It mainly used still images with captions intertwined within the pictures. It looked more like a powerpoint with transitions and sound. The first peer-editing workshop, lots of feedback was given to us such as using narration or less still images. The main suggestion was to have more movement in the video. Taking this suggestion, we began to evolve our video by adding Scott narrating the video. We kept a lot of the images but added more video footage from places such as Youtube that we thought would help depict what Scott was arguing. We used less captions and paraphrased them into short key phrases or terms. With this, our video started to add more movement and become less of a powerpoint. The second peer-editing workshop, the main feedback looked at how to make the video more interesting and aimed toward the popular audience. As a group, we decided that by using a whiteboard, we could draw out and depict what the narration that way there was movement and less still images. This was a big change for our video because before, we were trying to clip audio with the images. However, now we decided, the narration should be the main focus and from here, decided to clip the visual to the audio. It was much easier to do this way and caused it to flow nicely.

The major lesson we learned through this process of revision, was the importance and difficulty of adapting to your audience as writers who are entering a new medium of communication. Though we had a concept in place that would be digestible to a general audience, the form of the video was not doing the job. We began to look to other youtube videos about political science, videos we watched in class, and tried out multiple movie-makers before finding the style that would work for us. We went from using stupeflix to using Imovie, and from still images to original filming done by us and a lot of video editing. In fact, many of the sentences that seem to flow as if they were taken straight from the recording, were chopped up and fit into the Imovie functions as if we were musicians trying to complete the flow of a beat for our song. The audio maintains the rhythm/plot of our video, while the visual supplements that with additional content and images to concretize the concepts being presented to the audience.

The organization and thesis of our video closely mirrored the paper. Our thesis is that depending on which type of audience the author is writing for, qualitative or quantitative, then the type and use of evidence, language, and formatting all change. We organized our video by having an opening that tried to evoke some of the kairos surrounding the current political climate and then moved into our thesis. We talked next about the commonalities that exist in the field before moving on to the two specific approaches and how the evidence, language, and formatting change in them. We finally closed by again trying to relate this to a broader audience with the political kairos.

The whiteboard drawings were first used in order to direct the video towards the popular audience. It took the specific paper that Scott had written and turned it into a video that is understandable by the public. Using the whiteboard, we could depict what was important and basically present the main ideas and themes of the argument. Another reason we decided to use this for our video was in order to make our video more interesting for the viewers. At first, our video was very bland and just had the viewer reading words off of a slide. As time went on, we adapted our video to make it more interesting and engaging from the viewer’s perspective. Using personal experience, it is easier to stay focused and engage in a video when there is lots of movement and not just words or someone talking straight through. Too many images can cause a person to lose focus and get lost in our argument.

We used evidence from the paper but also added our own evidence when we converted it into a video. In the paper, evidence was mainly from the interview that Scott conducted with Dr. Siavelis and the three articles that he read that were written by Dr. Siavelis. When we moved to video, we added drawings on a whiteboard to visually show what we were saying in the narration and provide a way of showing the evidence without just putting text on the screen. We also used images that represented things that were being talked about. We added the audio of the interview with Dr. Siavelis so the audience could hear his voice instead of listen to Scott read what he said. The evidence helped make the video appeal more to a popular audience while also supporting our thesis.

For the narration, Scott took the script and recorded it. We thought narration would be effective because the audience would not have to read things off the video, but could listen and the images would help enhance the narration. We also included audio from the interview as a supplement for narration for the same reason. Instead of putting a quote on the screen or having Scott read what Dr. Siavelis said, we just had him say it for us. This, in our opinion, makes him more compelling and makes the evidence stronger because it is coming directly from him.

One addition that if we had more time to do would be using live footage of the interview. This would have been helpful in the video if we had some footage or clips of the interviewee Moreover, this could have helped our credibility in our argument because people can see for themselves that the words were directly from the interviewee. Reflecting on it, we can identify how it would have also added another element of movement or change-up in the video. Along with this, we think conducting another interview would have been very helpful. This would have again added to our credibility as authors for our argument because multiple people have this viewpoint. On the other hand, it could have expanded our argument or viewpoints if they were contradicting. It could have added to the conversation as a whole and could have possibly made our video argument more in depth. One thing that could have been interesting to do and different would be to interview other people first and find out their viewpoints on the subject and see what people already think or know about the subject. It would be interesting to hear people’s thoughts outside the discourse community of Political Science and if they are accurate or differ. We think this could have made the video more interesting and help direct it towards the popular audience more.

This process was rough, difficult, and may not have turned out a perfect product, but ultimately helped us gain skills as writers that are becoming more and more necessary to have. First, the ability work with other writers to produce pieces for an audience is increasingly frequent. Even when we aren’t writing together, it is important to sustain working relationships with your peers, because you ultimately will help each other grow as writers and as people. Second, the ability to condense and apply the rhetorical analysis we’ve been working on as a class the entire semester into this video, is an important exercise of our thinking/seeing muscles a writers. This will allow us to identify important tactics and themes within writing that will again make us better writers. At the same time, it allows us a writers to help our audiences gain these same kind of skills by giving them a glimpse into this process of rhetorical analysis. Last but not least, the ability to adapt our essay through a multimedia format gives us, in a practical sense, the technical skills we need as writers to be able to sustain our careers. Moreover, it helps us contribute to the job of making writing – in this case political science writing – relevant to the everyday person’s life, generating more interest in the subject, and hopefully more writers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yw88uUtXmc