WORKSPACE | wtng321

9/8/2016

In Fraser's essay there were many different key arguments. One of those key arguments was that different groups, mainly different minorities will chose different spheres in which to receive their information. While a large singular sphere aims to be inclusive of all, this in turn actually makes it more exclusive, only catering to the large majority who become the de facto leaders. These different spheres greatly reduce boundaries that may have been previously in place due to what is considered the norm. By having multiple spheres catering to all needs every person can find what they are looking for or a community to identify with even if the topic may be against the norm or majority. We need multiple spheres because not everybody is equal or will agree on an idea. Often times people are talking about public issues such as the environment, gender equality, race equality, etc. This talk is a way to try and get other people to listen. Ideas are created, amended, and evolved here. One group may be considered more powerful than another, i.e men are more powerful than women. This also relates to how certain actions can be seen as one way to one group and as something completely different to another. For example a feminist can be seen as overbearing harassment to a male while to women it may seem like they are just fighting for their own equal rights. It is hard to define what is for the common good of all and what is a public or a private matter. In more recent days hard issues are now becoming public matters.

9/12/2016

The first point I learned from our assigned reading was to create an audio story, there has to be a set course of actions with a lot of description. Because the radio is an audio format, there has to be a lot of details so the listener can really visualize and connect with what is happening. A set course of actions allows the listener to keep track of what is happening and want to listen to the end. If there is nothing to look forwards to or they don't understand they'll stop listening. Another thing I learned was when you're doing an interview you have to have certain questions you want answers to but not necessarily a set structure. This allows you to get the information that you want but also leaves room to ask follow up questions in response as well as ask for personal stories or more information on the spot. Along with the interviews, I learned that where you do the interview is very important. The interview has to be done in a room that is very quiet and doesn't echo. A room with carpet is preferable. You can use an iPhone and a cheap microphone for interviews but in order for the sound to be the best, the microphone should be held just a few inches under the person who is talking's chin. When the interviewer is asking a question they should make sure they hold the microphone under their own chin or else their question wont record clear enough. The last thing I learned was that you have to be very particular with sounds when you are editing. When people talk they natural pause and take breaths. When you are cutting and editing clips you have to make sure all the pauses and breaths sound natural so you can't tell that anything has been done to the audio. Sometimes when audio is cut a breath or "um" wont sound natural in the progression so you have to change it with another one. When you are doing an interview you should always get a little over a minute worth of white noise in the room for this editing purpose.

9/15/2016

It was difficult to put together all of the different pieces of me in one short poem. I feel like I didn't fully capture all of myself accurately in this poem. Right now one of the biggest aspects of my life is my love for music and going to concerts yet I didn't even mention that once because it didn't seem to fit in to the given template. I focused much more on the far past more so than the recent past. I reflected a lot on my young childhood experiences especially what happened over the weekends and at my grandparents' house over the summer. I don't feel like there were details about myself I was worried about sharing because generally I am an open book. The most revealing part about myself was definitely stating that I have been to Israel and that it is one of my favorite places. There is the huge conflict between Israel and Palestine and you never know which side a person is going to be on. While I don't necessarily consider myself a zionist I am pro Israel which without going into super amounts of detail isn't necessarily portrayed in the poem. I also feel like with what I did write I could have added in more details to it (which I probably will do anyways because it will bug me if I don't). Reflecting back on my experiences it helped me appreciate how happy I was as a child and how lucky I am to have what I do. Something I didn't mention is my parents are divorced and have been since I was a very young age. I didn't mention this on purpose because while having divorced parents is not considered the usual or ideal childhood I feel like it has given me even more opportunities that I would have never had otherwise which in retrospect I could have mentioned.

9/19/2016

When you're being asked about your stories what are, what is the message you really want people to understand from it?

When being interviewed do you feel more comfortable in a conversational setting or more of a strict, interviewer asks and question and you answer format?

What kind of questions seem redundant/pointless to you?

For you, what is the difference between talking about something that is uncomfortable versus something that might actually be unsafe for you.

9/26/2016

I learned a lot from talking to Chanda and Sana last Thursday. Most of all I learned that when you're interviewing somebody, you should be yourself and even when you are nervous, don't act like it. If you're nervous then the person your interviewing will be nervous and that doesn't create a good environment. At least if the person you're interviewing thinks you're calm and confident and feels like they can connect with you then they are more likely to share more of their story with you. If the person you're interviewing gets emotional, give them some silent space. Their stories are hard and it takes a lot of courage to cry in front of somebody else. Also if you are videotaping an interview, don't use the crying footage it is very inhumane. While it differs person from person, format the interview in a way that makes the interviewee feel most comfortable. They are the ones telling the story and you want them to feel as comfortable in the environment and with you as you can. This sometimes means making small talk and acting like its more of a conversation instead of an interview. No matter what format the interview takes the interviewer should always have a set of questions they want answered in one form or another. You need to make sure you have all of their background and are fully immersed in the story and are dedicated to telling it the way the interviewee wants it to be told. The story should be positive, there should be a positive air to it because they here and they are alive.

When editing my own audio essay I think I am going to cut it down further and focus on specific parts of the story. There are a lot of pieces to mine that don't necessarily create one cohesive whole or even something worth listening to and I want to change that. I'm not 100% sure which pieces I'm going to use yet but I think I am going to talk about my grandparent's house and how much it meant to me which also leads in with my parents divorce and my love for concerts. While the other pieces are still extremely important to me I think they can be shortened and combined with the others in a way that creates a better story as a whole and something with more of a plot line and sequence of events.

10/13/2016

Chapter 4 of our textbook was about how to structure a story. Structuring a story is one of the hardest parts of putting a story together. There are a lot of different parts of a story but they have to be put together in a way that keeps the listener interested. Sometimes this means going in chronological order but not always. If you do go in chronological order you don't always need to start at the very beginning of the story because if there is a lot of useless information the listener might forget or just stop listening. You can start at the beginning but trim down the details and include them while the action is happening. There also needs to be some sort of hook to get the listener interested. Another component is even though there might be a bunch of smaller interesting stories, they have to somehow to relate to create and over arching message. If that doesn't happen there is no point in telling the story at all.

Our group has not yet had a chance to conduct our interview. As a person I am very structured and like to come up with ideas of exactly how things are supposed to be in what order and what format. Of course for our interviews this isn't possible because I have no way of knowing what Chanda is going to say, how much detail she will give, and how that will fit in with the questions we have already came up with. She did give us some guidelines of what she wanted to talk about so we based our questions around that the best we could. I don't think I would necessarily reformat our questions but maybe make a core group of questions with information we definitely want to know and build from there based on her responses.

10/24/2016

This reading was about sound effects and how and when to use them effectively in a radio story. The chapter was titled "deep sea" which was then used as a metaphor to describe sound effects in a way the reader would understand. Deep sea is used as a metaphor for sound effects because if done the right way, the possibilities for sound effects are endless. There is no straight line of information about the deep sea that can be clearly defined as right or wrong much like sound effects. Sound effects can be looked down on as cheesy which is true if they are used the wrong way. The point that was trying to be made is if you pay a lot of attention to the sound effects that you're using, when you're using them, and how you're using them they can be extremely effective, the possibilities are endless like the deep sea. In terms of our own stories, we should think about where sound effects might fit with the story and where they might not.

11/3/2016

The primary purpose of the edit is to perfect a story and get more than one person's perspective. Multiple edits will be done for each story. At first an edit may consist of two to three people listening to the story and giving feedback but as the process progresses the edits will consist of the entire team. The team will listen to the story and tear it apart, picking out everything that is wrong with it and could be confusing to the reader. This is harsh but it is the only way to make a good story great. Once the story teller receives the feedback they will spend time editing their story based on the feedback then bring it back for an edit again to fine tune it even more. This process happens until all team members are satisfied that the product is the best story that it can be. Getting multiple opinions, sometimes opinions from people not involved, are very helpful because when you are the one hearing the same story over and over again often times details can get lost. An outside perspective of what the listener would be hearing is helpful to see what you may have missed and what you may have understood because you created the story but the general listener does not.

Framing is very important in a story because the listener has to be able to understand what exactly is happening, who is the protagonist and antagonist, what the setting is, and how their supposed to look at the story. Without this the listener can get lost if they don't understand where the story is taking place and what they're supposed to be thinking. If the main character or protagonist is unclear they may not understand the story as a whole. This is similar with signposting. Many details such as different character names can't be thrown at the listener all at once or else they will get confused and not remember who is who, who is good and who is bad and who the main character is. There have to be figurative signposts to make sure the listener doesn't forget key details that were introduced at the beginning of the story and may have gotten lost in the mix as the story progresses. Signposting is when you point out to the listener that they should be paying attention to something specific. Framing and signposting are both very important because if the listener gets lost or confused they might stop listening. Telling a radio story isn't like writing a piece meant to be read because infinite amounts of details cannot be include. The story teller has to be able to explain the situation, where it is taking place, and who the characters involved are without confusing the listeners.

11/10/2016

In almost all of our feedback each person understood that the purpose was to explain Chanda's struggle with assimilation, learning her own culture versus trying to survive in America as a refugee and what that meant. Based on our feedback people seemed to understand the story. This is good because in our first edit a lot of the feedback said people didn't really understand how the story progressed or flowed. Within that though we were told some of our transitions were on the weaker side so that is definitely something we need to work on fixing. They need to be longer to allow more time to process the information received and move on to the next idea or story. Overall we received positive feedback about our pacing. The biggest negatives we got were on our intro and our conclusion. Some people didn't like our intro slides while other people did. Either way we deifnitely need to add music to them. With our conclusion people felt that our video cut off too suddenly and that were was no real ending to the story. Originally we had thought we had a nice ending so we definitely need to go back and look at our footage and reevaluate what we have. Our main revisions we will be making will be fixing our intro slides and adding music, making our transitions smoother and more cohesive, and working on our conclusion. We still have to decide whether or not we want Jasmine's voice asking Chanda the question at the end.

The person I showed our video to understood right from the beginning that Chanda was a refugee from Cambodia and although she had never lived there her parents did. They understood that Chanda struggled with balancing her life as a Cambodian woman was also as a child that had to adjust to living almost two different lives. Chanda's parents losing three kids was very heartbreaking. The most compelling moment was when Chanda was talking about her parents losing 3 kids. They were confused on some of the historical background and wanted more detail about what was happening in Cambodia at the time. From this feedback we will add in more information in our intro slides about the Khmer Regime and how that effected Cambodia and created the refugee situation.

11/14/2016

An oral history is the spoken history. Oral history is co-constructed because it isn't just one person telling the history. One person tells it to another person who tells it to another person who tells it to another person and so on and so forth. The history is being passed down by word of mouth with different details added and changed by each person who tells the history or the story. It isn't told the same way by every person who tells it making it a co-constructed product. To "map coherence" onto the "disorder of lived experience" means to make the story of an entire person's life understandable and meaningful to somebody who has no idea who this person is. Yes life is linear in the sense that you ate breakfast, then you went to class, then you met with a group, etc. but thoughts and feelings aren't often linear and you don't necessarily have to tell every detail of the story or even tell it in order. Life is full of different crazy experiences, emotions, and feelings, and it can be difficult to condense that into something that means something to somebody who knows absolutely nothing about that person and frankly doesn't even know why they should care about them.

When comparing this to our own project we have to think about why we are telling this story. What is the point of telling the people who are watching our project about Chanda's life and her experiences? It isn't a matter of trying to find the most important details; Every piece of her life and experience is important. Our refugee's entire life story can't be told so it's about picking which story we want to tell, find meaning in that story, and make a project that allows our viewers to understand that meaning.

This project helps me think about multimodal compositions as more than just two aspects. Previously I had really just been thinking of multimodal as audio and visual whether that is pictures or video. Looking at this project made me realize it can be so many more things at once. There can be audio that goes with writing along with pictures but it doesn't have to be set up in a traditional linear fashion where you're just scrolling down a page. There can be so many different interconnecting parts that don't have to necessarily make linear sense. Honestly this made me think of public audiences as smarter. I am a public relations major and we are always told to write very simply so everybody can understand no matter what. While of course this is still the case that doesn't mean that the whole project has to be extremely simple. While making out own project I have been thinking very linearly because that is what makes most sense to me and what will probably make the most sense to a new person viewing it but that doesn't mean it is the best way for the story to be told.

This project just affirms my thoughts that telling the story of somebody's life is so extremely difficult you can't do it in just a few minutes of video. There are so many different parts of a person that happen throughout their life that make up who they are. These events don't have to be large either. It is impossible to tell the entirety of a person's life and what makes them them without being there and living their life with them. While going through this project I only got through a small portion of the clips. It takes a lot of time and effort to tell a complete and engaging story about a person's life. The project made me realize that it isn't always the huge stories that matters, it's the small things too. Only telling the big stories is generalizing somebody's life down to a single moment. You also have to include the smaller moments that maybe didn't have a large impact in the moment but when combined really help make a person who they are. By telling these smaller stories you're helping their story to be authentic. You aren't just using one big story as shock and awe. You have to have a big center point or story at least in our case but you also need the smaller details to go along with it.

11/21/2016

1) My biggest contribution was the technical aspect of the project. Our project was on iMovie on my computer so I did a lot of the physical editing including finding the clips we wanted and putting them in our movie, putting in the wording and transitions, and organizing our project. Equally with Paige I helped decide which clips we wanted in the video, the order we wanted them in, and just the overall theme of our video. I feel like my contributions were valuable to our team. I liked working with other people and bouncing ideas off each other to figure out what was best for our video.

2) What pleases me the most about our video is the story. I loved everything that Chanda had to say, even everything we couldn't fit in. Originally we were worried about her not opening up about her story because it was her first time sharing it and she was nervous but she was very open with everything and answered every question we had for her. This meant we had a lot of content to work with when making our video which helped us a lot. What displeases me the most is the quality of the video. There was a lot of loud noise in the background which we couldn't help and was hard to work with.

3) Although Chanda gave us a lot of detail, I would have asked her to go into even more details about certain things she talked about like her non-profit and exactly how she is trying to raise her daughter. I would have also gotten more b-roll footage to put into the video so we could have used Chanda's voice as a voice over to other footage. Although it couldn't be helped, I would have conducted the interview in a place that didn't have as much background noise, didn't echo, and had a plain background. Overall I am satisfied with where our video is headed and will fix everything we can for our final version.

12/5/2016

In Kerry's reflection she specifically stated each objective then argued how she met it without specifically stating she was arguing it. I really liked this. I don't think I will specifically state the objectives but I am definitely going to make it more clear that i met the objectives and argue using context from our readings and other things we talked about in class. Kerry also went into specific clear detail on each process and I feel like I had a lot of fluff in mine. I am definitely going to think about that moving forwards and in refining the content I already have to make it better

While going through both reflections I was writing down things I liked from theirs and wanted to add something similar to mine. The biggest thing I need to work on is arguing how I met the objectives.

More detailed intro to the project and to the reflection
Go into specifically about how we developed questions
Look at objectives and see how I met them and talked about them already
Go deeper into the story and how a story should be formatted (how the subject grows and changes)
Add more about best practices when talking about not crying and sob stories
Creative commons + citations
Talk about how exactly we formatted the video, intro, audio, video, etc.
Mentioned things we learned in out on the wire like how to record, sound, best practices, edits, etc.