Multimodal Portfolio
This portfolio collects and reflects on the work I’ve done in Multimedia Writing and Composition, a course that pushed me to think about writing not just as words on a page but as a designed, sensory, rhetorical act.
The two projects you’ll find here are completely different and yet still both multimodal. One is a handwritten scrapbook cataloguing my 22nd birthday party. The other is a Canva presentation about the films of Michael Haneke and the way they implicate their audience in on-screen violence. Despite this, both are about what it means to be a witness to something and how the forms you choose to document things changes what they mean.
Reflection
Product
22nd Birthday Scrapbook/Journal Entry
For my first project, I created a scrapbook and journal entry documenting my 22nd birthday party, a David Lynch-themed night hosted by my friend James. I printed 4×6 photographs from CVS and arranged them chronologically in a journal I was actually gifted that same night, writing captions and reflections in my own handwriting alongside each photo.
What started as a fairly straightforward memory-keeping exercise turned into something I found moving. Having these photos physically printed and annotated, instead of just sitting on my phone, made them feel more special. It also made me think seriously about what it means to compose something with your hands, in a specific material object, using choices of layout and handwriting as meaning-making tools rather than just decoration.
Voyeur of Violence: The Films of Michael Haneke
For my second project, I built a multimedia presentation in Canva exploring the films of German-Austrian director Michael Haneke, specifically how his work critiques the audience’s consumption of violence by making them complicit in it.
The presentation covers four of his films chronologically: Benny’s Video (1992), Funny Games (1997), The Piano Teacher (2001), and Caché (2005), using still images and embedded video clips alongside written analysis.This was the project I was most excited about all semester. Haneke’s films, especially The Piano Teacher, are some of my favorite works of art in any medium, and getting to write about them in a Writing and Rhetoric course using the multimodal tools the class gave me felt like a perfect intersection of my academic and personal interests.
Process
The artifacts below document the thinking and composing that happened throughout this semester. Included are selections from my self-observation process work (Process Work 4), my books presentation reflection (Process Work 3), my applesauce cake heritage literacy post (Process Work 1), and a reading reflections. These are the rather messy record of my work through the course, which I think shows my development as a writer just like my final projects do.