Video Letter by Jasmine P.
View Jasmine’s Original Task
View Jasmine’s Modebending Task
Affected by how the pandemic has reshaped our lives this past year, Jasmine completely reenvisions her original task by delivering a heartfelt video of a letter to COVID. By situating her production so heavily in the context of our global pandemic and anthromorphosizing the virus, she harnesses the power of our collective feelings and lived experiences to speak directly to the vicious, unsentient, and unempathetic parasite that has caused all of us so much stress, anxiety, and pain, creating an emotionally engaging, important piece of work.
I appreciate that Jasmine recognizes that even in a difficult time, lessons can be learned to embrace living in a more fulfilling way. She shares an inspiring message when she says,
You’ve definitely taught me that I need to live a little more in the moment and appreciate the simple joys in life, and I know I will use these lessons moving forward.
Production and Tools
Curious about how everyone’s content-authoring tools and process, I asked Jasmine for more details:
I used my laptop mic (I wish I had a Yeti mic, they’re great) and Audacity to record the audio. I then put it together in Camtasia. The visuals were all from Pixabay and the music was from Bensound (all royalty-free). I then uploaded it to YouTube as an unlisted video.
Jasmine’s video production includes soft background music that evokes sentimentality, and videos with imagery that represent the slow, painful passage of time in a waiting period, as well as the emptiness, loneliness, and isolation during the pandemic in contrast to what life was like before with crowds of people in outdoor and indoor public spaces.
In her own words, she says,
“The end product and incorporation of the letter I wrote, the narration, music and video clips turned what was a static image into something meaningful for me. It is probably the first time that I have actually reflected this deeply on the changes in our lives that we’ve experienced over the last year. Putting it together did stir some emotion”
You can hear the emotion in her voice, especially as she nears the end of her letter.
Jasmine’s production was multimodal and used visuals and audio to convey mood and meaning, and my production was 100% audio with no visuals. Like music and images, sound effects can create a mood and convey meaning, and though our productions were different, I think the impact of our end result is the same. In creating our video and audio files, similar techniques were used to edit and time our visuals and sound effects in order to affect mood or create meaning. One could choose to listen to a video much in the same way they listen to a pure audio file and create their own visuals and meaning-making, or choose to watch the video for more direct access to the author’s meaning-making.
Literacies & Theories
In the New London Group’s discussion of the role of design in multiliteracies and meaning-making, design and redesign processes are described as powerful tools for the transformation of meaning-making for both the designer and learner. Jasmine and I both privilege this pedagogical stance that champions modebending as a transformative learning process. Through producing her video letter, Jasmine reflects deeply on how much life has changed during the pandemic, and this process of reflection during this redesign creates a new layer of meaning for her that the first task did not create.
The following from the New London Group spoke to Jasmine and I:
Through these processes of Design, moreover, meaning-makers remake themselves. They reconstruct and renegotiate their identities (1996).
By recontextualizing her original design and situating it in the context of the pandemic, she has revealed much more about herself, how she sees the world, and importantly, what she’s learned to share a powerful message of hope that brightens this darkness.
References
The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.