I found it very challenging to summarize the movie using only emojis. I started with the title, and actually, I chose this movie because I feel that the title is easy to visualize by emojis. Initially, I was considering another TV show but I was not able to find the right emoji to capture the title. I think that the reason why I found visualizing the title hard is that the words used in the title are more abstract, making it difficult to find the appropriate visual representation.

I noticed that I rely on ideas and words in this assignment, and did not pay much attention to syllables. Looking for a suitable emoji to convey ideas is the most difficult, and I spent a lot of time selecting events that the emoji can represent. It almost felt impossible to find a picture for some words that are general and vague. This thought process is even different from creating a picture summary from scratch, where I would at least have the freedom to create my own symbols to represent my ideas. In this assignment, I felt constrained by the limited emojis available on my phone, failing to convey my original thoughts. I also noticed that I described the plot in chronological order, much similar to writing a summary. Is it because I am so well-trained with conventional writing to state everything in time order? 

Kress(2005) states that all communication is always multimodal and further examines how information is being delivered in different modes: “speech and writing tell the word; depiction shows the world” (p.16). It further illustrates how speech and writing are controlled by the author, and the interpretation of pictures largely depends on the viewers. Therefore, text and pictures are processed differently in our heads, and it is arrogant to use rules for writing to understand pictorial meaning simply. Today, pictures and films are dominating current social media platforms and the multimodal representation has become the new norm in communication and delivering meanings. As a result, reading is no longer a simple act of picking up the written words, but a more complicated process of “taking meaning and making meaning from many sources of information, from many different sign-systems” (Kress, 2005, p. 17). As an educator, it makes me question whether my literacy teaching practice is preparing my students for this multimodal representation that they will face in the future. Do we teach them strategies to comprehend this representation of information? Do we give our students enough opportunities to create multimodal content to express their ideas?