Things I Have Learned

I learned a few important things about multimodal compsoing these past few days. Well, I learned a lot, actually. More importantly, however, I also remembered a lot of things I had forgotten about composing in general. There'a a lot that I have come to take for granted composing in print. Before I get some much needed sleep I want to get some of this down. Here goes:

• I wasted a ton of time with experimentation. Having an outline would have helped a lot. I do a lot of the work of invention while I write my papers and arrange as I go. Either I'm just more practiced with this technique in print composing or outlining is more essential when composing multimodal texts.
• If I ask students to do this kind of work, I'm going to have to give them a lot of time and reinforce the fact that 11th hour work is really difficult.
• Writing (or composing) an abstract helps a lot. While finishing this thing up tonight I realized that the paper I hope will grow from this "trailer" will be much better for the work I've done here.
• Richard and Paul were correct: working with problematic assets takes time. I need to learn how to interview better and come to the interviews with a very clear idea of what I need as far as assets.
• Trauman's mp3/DV camera hack (hooking the Edirol to a splitter and then running it though the microphone input on the camera) was excellent. The sound quality was almost unbearable in the DV clips, so having the mp3s was infinitely helpful.
• Side note: The Edirol/DV hack let me cut down long responses to interview questions. I used Audacity to edit the "ums" and "ahs" out of middle of the audio and synced up video clips with uncut audio at either end.
• Shooting long interviews give you a lot of interesting things to work with, the problem is working with them.
• Splitting clips first and then keeping the split clips in iMovie is essential. Trying to drag long clips into the timeline and then splitting them here caused all kinds of problems.
• iMovie really is a drag in a lot of ways but it would have been easier if I had taken the advice I hand out all the time: RTFM.

So, that's it. I hope you like the project!