Bringing It All Together

If you have been following along with the Multi Media Memoir project Monica Gill and I have been working on with her 7th grade class at William Gray Elementary you know that we have spent the first few classes gathering images and dialogue and talking about how to transform that media into media that specifically relates to the memoirs.

You can catch up on this project by reading my previous posts.
Let the Memoirs Begin
Transforming Media, Literally
Putting the Multimedia in our Memoirs

As I said for the past few classes we have been writing memoirs, gathering media and manipulating media. In theory, each students should have a big bucket assets to begin to their multimedia memoir.

However, this can be very daunting for students and professionals alike staring at a pile of images with no clear guide to follow beyond a written memoir. To help the students begin to compile their multimedia memoirs we had them create visual timelines.

To create the visual timelines students used the Timeline Maker iPad app. Students were asked to put their images into the app in chronological order. This gave students an idea of where they were missing images, repeating images or using images that don't support their memoir.

Of course the best laid plans don't always work out. Much to my surprise the students were having a difficult time using images to visually retell their written memoir. As a college professor in an Art + Design department I find this is the exact opposite with my college students.

My college students work in the exact opposite manner thinking all pieces of media are about the visual and fixate on creating visual imagery. They rarely take time to consider the story behind the images they are creating.

I even co-developed a college level design class that focused on writing stories before transforming them into visual stories to break college students of this habit.

To help our 7th graders develop and utilize images and multimedia in the visual memoirs Monica and I came up with two additional assignment sheets.

The goal of these assignment sheets was to provide students a scaffolding for knowing what types of images they were going to need and what their purpose was in the multi media memoir. You can see the text from assignment sheets below.

Multimedia Memoir

Putting it all Together

Objective: Create a visual representation of your written memoir that shows your understanding of elements of high quality narrative writing including: pacing and transitions, dialogue and narration, vivid description, mood, thoughts and feelings, and a clear sequence of events.
Your final iMovie product must clearly include all of the following:

VISUAL REQUIREMENTS

Use of Adobe Collage App to create images necessary to convey thoughts or meaning in your memoir that can’t be done with a single, unedited image. 15pts

Use of Adobe Photoshop Touch App to change the meaning of existing images to visually support your memoir. 15pts

Extensive use of multiple/differing images within iMovie to retell your memoir. Having too few images will result in memoirs that are too fast, short, under told, unclear, etc. More images are better since you can edit out images later. 30pts

Image pacing and appropriateness. Do your images flow together logically and retell your memoir or are they randomly placed without helping tell the story? 15pts

Image and dialogue/narration integration. When using sound does it link two images, does it convey a message that an image alone cannot, does it indicate a major gap in time? If the sound doesn’t serve one of these purposes it shouldn’t be used. 15pts

Use of text within memoir. Text should not be relied upon to tell your memoir. Images, spoken dialogue and narration should be used first. If text is used, is it appropriate to the image, is the text necessary or should you narrate instead of including text? 10pts

Multimedia Memoir

Putting it all Together

Objective: Create a visual representation of your written memoir that shows your understanding of elements of high quality narrative writing including: pacing and transitions, dialogue and narration, vivid description, mood, thoughts and feelings, and a clear sequence of events.
Your final iMovie product must clearly include all of the following:

IMAGE INVENTORY

Setting
You should have at least 5 images of your setting. Some examples are the outside of the building or house. A photo of the characters in the actual setting. Details of the inside of the setting: what does the room look like, what is on the walls, where do people sit.

Who
You want at least 3 images for each of your characters. Examples could include a picture of your character in the setting, a picture displaying a specific mood, etc. A standard picture of the character posing would also be helpful to use in Adobe Collage to create a new image that relates to the memoir.

Thoughts and Feelings 
You should have at least 2 images that signify the thoughts and feelings of each character in your memoir. You don’t want to show the actual character, rather something hat would suggest how the character was feeling. If the character was sad a picture of a rainy day would suggest that feeling. If the character was scared, a photo of a cemetery at night could be appropriate.

What
You need at least 4 images that show the view what happened in your memoir. Did you ride a bike? Did you visit your grandparents? Did you go to a baseball game? You need images in your multimedia memoir that are direct representations of the what happened or you need to make your own images that signify what happened.

Significance
You need 2 or more images to demonstrate the significance of your memoir. Did you become a life long baseball fan? Did you graduate to a new level? Did you win something? Whatever the significance of your memoir you need to visually demonstrate that.

Mood
All of your images need to be adjusted in Adobe Photoshop Touch for mood. You want the images to convey the exact emotion to the viewer as they do in your memoirs.

Points
Each image will be worth 2 pts for a totally of 30 pts. Extra images will be worth 1 pt extra credit.

Stay tuned for the next post as our students begin compiling their multimedia memoirs in the iMovie iPad app.