Process memo

Jasmine Smith

October 12, 2012

MWF 8am

The most logical place for me to begin my timeline was when I was a newborn. From there I went through each stage of literacy from then to now. I was able to recount so much information that I found my timeline overflowing. My timeline revealed my back and forth struggle with becoming literate. I would have a breakthrough one minute and encounter problems with reading the next. This pattern was prevalent throughout my whole timeline. The theme throughout my timeline was definitely my focus on becoming literate through reading and writing. Books played a major role in helping me become literate, I didn’t really learn through music or other activities. My timeline was all over the place and too long to be a narrative. I decided to focus on my experience with becoming literate through school. It wasn’t that hard to focus on school because most of my experiences were linked to school anyway. The experience of creating a timeline told me that I am a fighter. No matter what obstacle was thrown at me, with the love and support of my parents I was able to get past it.

I narrowed down an area of focus for my written narrative by just focusing on every defining moment I had in school that was related to literacy. It was hard to focus my thoughts, because I found myself wanting to focus on every moment and detail in my life that had to do with reading and writing. I organized my narrative chronologically; I basically just followed my timeline and added details to the events. I elaborated on events listed on my timeline so I could have a full narrative. My peer review session really helped me, they told me to focus on one theme instead of multiple ones. She gave my paper more structure and told me to elaborate more on certain things instead of being so vague. Once I made those few changes, my paper began to come to life. At this point, I saw exactly how I wanted my animoto video to go. Making the video turned out to be a lot harder than I thought.

Creating the animoto video was really hard, because a limited amount of characters were available to describe your story of how you became literate. My peer editor picked out fifteen sentences, but I found that they were all much to long to display on my video. I tried to cut a lot of the sentences, but I found that the sentences lost their significance when I deleted words. This began to frustrate me, because my story was turning into a video full of words that meant absolutely nothing. I finally realized how to reduce the size of a sentence and keep all of its meaning, but some of the sentences simply would not work. I found myself using other sentences in my narrative that fit better with telling my story through video. I used pictures in my video to compliment the sentences in the previous slide. It was a way to emphasize the message in the text slide. I used a lot of personal pictures, because what pictures can better describe me than me. The ones I used off of the Internet were just pictures of books to help the audience put a picture with a word. The song I picked for my background music was a song that said, “Don’t you know there has never been anyone like you and never will be again?”. This music spoke to me because throughout school I found it hard to just be me. I constantly looked for acceptance and ways to fit in. The song was all about being yourself and loving yourself through your flaws and everything. Loving yourself is so important especially when you are young and unsure of who exactly you are. You can just be you and that’s enough. Throughout becoming literate, I often found myself thinking I was stupid or not good enough because other people could read better than me, or write better than me. However, I now know that everyone is different and everyone moves at his or her own pace and that is okay. If it were one thing about my animoto video that I wish I could change, it would be adding more personal photos. I feel like that gives your video more of a warm feeling and makes it more relatable than a person’s with a lot of internet photos.