Emily Danes Portfolio Reflections

[0:00] Scrolling through class website, poetry website, film website

Hi there, I’m Emily Danes, and this is my e-portfolio video for English 150. As I’m sitting down to make this video, I’m realizing just how much I’ve learned since the beginning of the semester about many things about poetry and literature, and about different mediums for storytelling, about film or graphic novel, what have you, but especially about video editing.

[0:22] Video editing software

I really had no experience at all with video editing, so needless to say I’ve learned a lot since the beginning of the semester. 

[0:32] Scrolling through class website and thumbnails of classmates’ videos

In this video, I decided to focus on the e-portfolio materials and process because that’s where I think I’ve grown the most over the course of the semester. But before I talk about my e-poetry experience, I just want to focus on my e-poem essay. 

[0:45] Scrolling through brainstorming for poetry essay

I really did enjoy writing the poetry essay, and I have to admit from the beginning it was the assignment I was most excited about. So I knew it would be important to find a poem that I really wanted to write about.

[1:00] Scrolling through draft of poetry essay

So I spent a fair amount of time finding one that I was really moved by and that was substantial enough to write five inspired pages about.

[1:06] Poetry website showing “Fall of Rome” poem

So I actually just asked a friend for recommendations and she mentioned W. H. Auden. I looked him up and came across this poem. And actually the first read-through I hated it. It just seemed kind of strange and dissonant. It didn’t really sound good to me, I didn’t know what it meant. 

[1:27] Search engine showing results about “Fall of Rome” poem

So I started doing a little more research to figure out what it was really about. The more I read the more interested I became, and before I knew it the five pages just kind of came together on their own.

[1:36] Scrolling through “Fall of Rome” poem on poetry website

One of the things I’ve really loved about this class is that we are given the freedom to choose materials that inspire us to create something, whether it be an essay or video, that we really are passionate about.

[1:50] Search engine showing results for sonder poems

I knew my being passionate about Auden’s poem made it a lot easier to engage with it and to write a good essay about it. So I definitely wanted to find a poem for my e-poetry video that I would really be excited to spend a whole semester with.

[2:06] Video editing software 

I was initially pretty intimidated by the technological component of this class, so it definitely helped me to ease into the video making by writing an essay. 

[2:15] Poetry website and scrolling through essay drafts

I’m used to writing essays and I know what I need to do to start drafting an essay. It’s always kind of the same process, I just go into a Google Doc, get my thoughts down, end up cutting half of it, and later organizing it, editing whatnot into what becomes the final essay. 

So I decided to use this same kind of method when I was working on my video assignments. I would essentially write a rough script in almost the same structure as I would an essay. I found this approach made me a lot more comfortable with the technological component of this class. And by writing out an outline before I actually recorded the walkthrough videos, I was able to organize my thoughts and make sure I didn’t leave any important points out. 

[3:03] Blank document with outline being typed on screen

So with the exception of the e-poem itself, I found it was helpful to organize all my walkthroughs and the film review in the same way I would the essay. 

[3:09] Scrolling through class website and video thumbnails

As I was working with Camtasia and looking at my classmates’ e-poems…

[3:20] Music starts; quotations from various scholarly articles appear on screen. The first source is from Iversen, Stefan, Nielsen, Henrik Skov, Alber, Jan, 28.

I found that screen presentations of literature really do “invite the reader to rethink the nature of literature by offering a different experience of language.”

[3:28] Another quotation appears on the screen from the same source, but from page 27.

I also agree with the author of this book called Why Study Literature, that “one must bring to a multimedia presentation an implicit understanding of the operations of literary discourse.”

[3:35] Music stops; scrolling through drafts of video scripts

So while I didn’t have any experience with making videos, I had plenty of experience writing essays. 

[3:42] Video editing software

So I used my knowledge of language and of essay writing to orient myself in terms of presenting materials in a new video format instead of on paper. It did seem a little bit tedious at first, but I found that making the walkthrough videos was actually really helpful for me because it made me critically analyze my own work, and think about why I used the materials I did.

Before I made my walkthrough video for my e-poem, I really just put these images together in a a way that seemed to work. I used these materials because they were aesthetically pleasing and they just seemed to make sense somehow. 

[4:23] Quote on screen from Davis, 1

Actually, researcher Matthew Davis from Florida State University found that many of his students’ multimedia work was “patterned but not determined.” I knew that I focused on the aesthetic and the physical appeal of my project. But I didn’t think as much about why exactly I chose certain materials over others. 

[4:45] Video editing software

It wasn’t until I made these walkthrough videos when I actually realized why they made sense. I was able to identify commonalities of a lot of the material I had been using, and was able to strengthen later revisions with more meaningful imagery as a result.

[4:50] Quote on screen from Labbo, 1

As Labbo puts it in her article “From Writing Workshop to Multimedia Workshop,” “reflecting on the process of learning creates an awareness of the multiple sources and modes of information an author can combine to express her ideas.”

[5:10] Video editing software

So taking time to reflect on these materials and to think about why I used them helped me to choose materials more deliberately when I was constructing revisions on my e-poem. 

[5:35] Various scenes of e-poem playing

For example, when I was making my citations video and thinking about why I used the images I did, I realized that many of the images I had already used were either very busy and representative of the chaos and complexity of human life, or they were more still and introspective which to me encouraged the viewer to reflect on their own lives and to try to see them in perspective.

[5:50] Video editing software

So once I really articulated why I chose certain images and why they worked well, I was able to substitute a few images that didn’t work as well with ones that I thought better achieved the tone I was going for.

[6:04] Various scenes of first draft and final draft of e-poem playing on class website

So my original video I included this shot of a man having his picture drawn and of a man cutting something out of a piece of paper, and when I watched this video after really thinking about the message I was trying to convey, I just felt like these shots weren’t working as well as some others. So I decided to replace a whole section with some clips I found in this “People of Russia video.” So in the final version I included shots of a couple sitting together on a park bench and a woman on a bench with her child, and a man on vacation looking at a map. At first I would never have thought these images were more effective than the ones I already used. But I think I’m definitely more happy with the final project after just taking some time to reflect and revise the original piece.

[6:51] Class website showing student portfolios appears

So one of the main things I’ve learned this semester is just how important this revision process is. Often as students we work for a few weeks on a project or a presentation or whatever the case may be and then turn it in and never think about it again. In this class I was really challenged to keep returning to old work and making it even better. And I think that fully engaging in this revision process has really paid off and has improved the overall quality of my work. So I think that about wraps it up! Thanks for being with me on this long video, and I hope you enjoyed!

[7:30] Credits screen with scholarly sources and links to various videos used