InCopy Explainer Video
Context
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The purpose of this project was to show us that we could learn the basics of a technology
fairly quickly. It was based on how professional writing consists of more than just text based
products and incorporates more multimedia projects. In order to create the video, my partners
and I had to research the technology we were assigned. Because we were assigned InCopy,
and its features rely heavily on InDesign, we had two technologies to learn as well as the
technology used to screen capture the video. Following the research, our next task was to
script out the video and then to storyboard.
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Multimedia Rhetoric
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Writing for the ear is very different from writing for the eye. Although this project was for an English course, a communications course I was taking at the same time was teaching me about writing for radio, which is writing for the ear also. One of the canons that we never really use in writing for the eye is that of delivery, which deals with how something is said. In actual writing, there is no way to really know how the author intended the text to sound. However, with talking, a speaker can use the tones of their voice to convey messages.
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This project also allowed to practice visual rhetoric. The video is something other than the text that is seen by the audience. The visuals incorporated into the video have to add to the text that is being spoken or viewers could be mislead. The visuals for this specific video were technically symbols of what we were saying at the time the picture was on the screen. My group needed to be aware of what each picture was conveying to make sure it represented the idea we were hoping for. When we tested our video with peers, the feedback we got revolved around the disconnect between a few pictures and the words being said. Therefore we knew we needed to reevaluate the symbolism of those pictures.
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Evaluation
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I enjoyed this project, probably because it incorporated aspects of my major and minor (English and Communications, respectively). I find visual rhetoric fascinating because two different people can find different representations in pictures. This is because rhetoric is a socially structured context, so people develop different associations with different things. For example, a witness to a murder could associate red with death while someone else could associate it with love. Those are two very different concepts for on symbol. Visual rhetoric seems to be just as, if not more important than rhetoric within writing. It also adds a lot to written text. View the video below.
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