repurposing to remediating
You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.
- Amelia Earheart
When a door opens for you to choose any topic, any piece of writing to change and to adapt for new audiences, the freedom is overwhelming. There were so many pieces I had done before and so I turned instead to my passions for guidance. Helping people sounds cliché, so instead I'll say that I'm passionate about changing others lives for the better. [I'm passionate about helping people.] When this project was first assigned, I had recently completed the analysis of a girls' health website, girlshealth.gov, for a Womens Studies class. Writing that analysis brought out a fire in me that I hadn't known I posessed. Suddenly, I became obsessed with empowering young girls to take control of their health -- especially their mental and sexual health. This project gave me the perfect opportunity to expand upon something I was passionate about and I thought perhaps this would actually reach some young girls instead of dead-ending at a professors inbox. It was a fairly easy decision to use this piece as the starting point for this semester long project.
Think of your nose. Now think of your nose on your face. Now think of your face on your head which is on your body which is sitting in a chair staring at this page. Now think of your body in that chair, in a room, in this building which is located in some city in a country on this earth. Now keep going. Your nose on your face on your head that's on your body in a chair in a room that's in a building in a city located in a country on Earth in the solar system of this galaxy. Now think of your nose.
Your nose is the inspiration to my re-purposed paper. Your nose also happens to be my re-purposed paper. Yet, your nose is so amazing that it even resembles my re-mediated video.
Although your nose is just one small piece of you in this giant world, it could not exist without your face or your head or your body or the earth or the universe. So too would none of these projects exist without the big picture. The process that created this three-part journey was spread across an entire semester and at times it was hard to see the whole universe when I was focused so deeply on the one small appendage.
This first step in re-purposing is to find a new audience. Because the analysis of the girls' health website was strictly written as an assignment and was written for an audience who is familiar with feminist strategies, it was only logical that the re-purposed project should be for a broader audience. My hope for the end of this, as stated before, was that young girls would see the big picture and want to make a change in themselves and in their society. So my audience became pre-adolescent to post-adolescent girls (age range about 13-25).
The next step was to decide on a genre of writing as well as a publication venue for the project. Examples like magazine articles were thrown around, but I knew that I was just beginning my knowledge base of body image and sexuality so I would need many sources and it started to sound more like a research paper. So research paper it was. I had no idea what I was really getting myself in to, though. I began doing some literature review of what was already out there and that's when I realized it would be even more personable and relatable if I conducted a study of my own. My very own "research paper." It was quite an exciting thought and that was the end of my search for a venue. I'd just do a simple research paper and have the publication be some sort of peer-reviewed journal.
So many things came at me at once after that decision. I needed to create a study first and foremost, but it was unrealistic to do anything besides a survey. Once I found a survey making website that was easy to use, kwiksurveys.com, it was only a matter of creating questions; however, those questions had to be appropriate and effective so it took longer than I anticipated to come up with only nineteen total. Finally the survey was launched and posted to Facebook as well as sent out in emails and posted on my Women Studies class' announcement page. The response was overwhelming for such a small outreach and I got 195 participants.
Analyzing all of those results in the amount of time before the project was due was simply not reasonable, so instead I decided on a comprehensive overview of the findings. This proved to be most effective anyway because of the dramatic opinions on some issues such as sexual promiscuity in society.
One important thing that needed to be researched was how exactly to write a paper for a peer-reviewed journal. I went searching for examples and while there were many professional pieces that had been published, I found one article that was written by a graduate student. I felt that it was more attainable for me to aim at recreating a piece by someone closer to my level of expertise than it was to embrace a professional researcher. I also used the Purdue Online Writing Lab to learn what APA style papers consist of and how each section adds to the overall product.
Once I got on a roll with writing the separate sections of an APA style research paper, the whole thing didn't take very long. Nineteen pages and ten sources later, I had written my first ever research paper where my own study was presented. While it wasn't publishable by any means, I was proud to have created something new and to have tried out a new genre of writing that I had generally been pessimistic about before.
I knew from the very beginning of the project that I wanted to create a video for the re-mediation portion of this three-part journey. I had seen videos like "A Girl Like Me" in my Womens Studies class and I saw how effective they were at getting the people talking. Visual representation and creative ways of presenting the extensive nineteen page research paper was the best route I could take. Including surprising statistics from the survey was one of the first decisions I made about what to put in the video. In order to encompass as much as I could from the re-purposed project, it was important that there were three sections -- Body Image, Sexuality, and Popular Music's effects on those issues.
Storyboarding was supposed to be a very helpful process for this project and while I can't say that it worked entirely the way it should have for me, I can say that I'm glad I had that reference at times. The purpose of the storyboard was to create a roadmap that guided me through the video as I created it. However, I chose a very silly way of making my storyboard. Sticky notes are awesome, they're just not very awesome when you try to fit nine of them on one 8 1/2 X 11 sheet of paper with intricate details under each flap. It was way too much on one small paper (well three small papers in the end) and I ended up not being able to follow it at all. Perhaps with another method of storyboarding I could have had a clearer vision before jumping in. At any rate, the storyboard was finished and I had a general idea of what statistics from my study I would include, what music I would use, and what topics I would cover.
Post storyboard meltdown, I gathered three volunteers to participate in the interviews that would be included. I came up with a list of question that had been modified from the survey to ask them to talk about on camera. After getting into trouble at the Instructional Support Services equipment loan office for failing to return a camera on time (don't worry I've cleared it up,) I was forced to use my own digital camera to record the interviews which ended up being just fine for this purpose.
Besides sitting down to cut the video together with slides, text, music, video, etc., there was one other thing that I needed to complete my vision -- A Diag Day. I wanted to do chalk outlines of random women passing through the diag to show how no two women have the same body type. I did get my Diag Day; however, it is quite impossible to do accurate chalk outlines of people in coats. Winter really wasn't the best time to do this. The outlines ended up looking like blobs with flapping arms. I embraced it and included a shot of it in the video anyway. I also got some interviews about what people thought of society's view on body image as well as what percentage of women they thought had the natural body size of a supermodel. It was so interesting to get everyone's perspectives and to talk to strangers about such an intimate topic. Many commended me on my efforts which was also very uplifting in this long process that seemed like it might never end.
FInally I had all of my footage and I was ready to start cutting together video, music, text, transitions, you name it. This was tedious and frustrating at times, but one thing I am proud to say is that I had a vision of the galaxy and by putting one piece of the body together at a time, I was able to create that vision in the end.
Break time. Here's your peek backstage. Consider this a detour.
Welcome to the only page that will surely say more about me than it will about you.
