Final Multimodal Project: Scenes from Grandfather's Scrapbook

A Digital Video Draws on 5+ Modes and Literacies:
Oral, Aural, Gestural, Alphabetic, Visual

Audience, Purpose/Goals, and Choices
Audience -- My community college students enrolled in Asian American History classes in Oakland, California who will complete a multimodal assignment as part of the course requirements.  At the same time, I hope to reach a broader audience beyond my classroom to tell the untold story about the Japanese American wartime experience in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

https://www.wevideo.com/hub#projects

https://www.wevideo.com/hub#project/1430454086

My 5 minutes/30 seconds video serves as a re(mediation) of the Teaching with Technology Teaching Philosophy Statement, the Infographic, and how to conduct research in Asian American Studies using digital and archival materials.  While I consider the video to be a DEMO using a "free" trial version of WeVideo online, I also wish to take the audience on a visual journey to Japan and Santa Fe.  I start with popping clues and upbeat music so that the audience will be engaged.  The colorful images are a way to spark interest within the first 50 seconds, and to provide meaning about a sense of place such as dates, landscape, nature, symbols, and motifs.  I hope to enact movement and motion on a digital platform.  I also employ "silence" to slow the experience down -- to allow the viewer to really take the time to soak in the messages.

From 1940-1946, the world was in turmoil.  I chose the (re)mixed and (re)mediated title: 
1941 to 1945 Scenes from Grandfather's Scrapbook Santa Fe
as a direct way to personalize major historical events in the physical, economic, social, and emotional lives of Japanese Americans, including my parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and other family members who were incarcerated from 1942-1945 in Gila River Arizona.

The colorful movement and flow of the first section of the video is vastly changed to the embodied black and white confinement of prison life in the second section.  Flowers naturally serve as the metaphor of life and death.  They represent fragility, beauty, and the impermanence of life.

The digital "scrapbook" functions as a living document of primary resources including archival photographs of the men in the Santa Fe prison camp along with a variety of excerpts such as information from interviews, postcards, newspapers, letters, and other materials.    

My artistic intent is for the viewer to experience looking through a photo album, as if turning pages with deliberate pauses as the visual narrative unfolds in front of the readers' eyes.

In the last section, I add clips that put the DEMO into "teaching mode" with a young woman at work in front of a laptop.  We see a shift in the narration at the closing of the video.

The Ortiz Dog Park is the location of the current memorial site with a plaque on a rock.

What are the multiple goals of this DEMO?
It should be inviting. 
It should be relevant.

It should spark curiosity.
It should say something to the audience. 
It should be eye-catching!
It should start a conversation. 
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I really enjoyed doing this assignment! (About 30-35 hours total which included research work).