The Multimodal Text is Finished!

What has been included in my Multimodal Text

Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic

• Animations; in every scene there is an animation, pictures appear on the stage with either the 'fly in' or 'compress' animation. When pictures have no been animated this is because it is used as a background to set the scene
• Sounds; sounds are included to set the scene such as a school bell ringing every new day that has started. Some sounds were downloaded from the internet either by converting a Youtube video to an MP3 file with the program Youtube Downloader or a specific website; 'Soundjax' that allows you to download WAV files that you can only use on the slides
• Font; in my text I have used the font style 'Segoe script' due to it looking similar to handwriting and in pink to highlight that it's a girl's diary
• Videos; I have used two videos in my text to produce meaning, both which were downloaded through Youtube Downloader and then I could cut the videos down to a reasonable length; for example I managed to download the whole scene of Harry Potter fighting the snake in the second film but this was more than a 5 minute clip so with Youtube Downloader I could cut it down to around 20 secs but still portraying the original message of Annabelle's imagination of fighting a snake!

Postmodernism

• Use of conflicting modes; I have used drawings, pictures of classroom settings and also cartoon pictures
• Tension created within focus of text; I have used hyper-links so that the reader will click on the headteacher to see what he actually sees rather than just Annabelle's point of view
• The use of hyper-links allowed me to move away from the setting of being in classroom to Annabelle's dream to show why she started to attack the teacher thinking there was an alien capturing holding her captive

The Multimodal Text

Link to Google Drive with Multimodal Text

Creating the Multimodal Text: Part One

Day One Completed

Today I have finished creating the first day of Annabelle's school on Microsoft Powerpoint, before starting it today I had read about the use of framing in picture books. Nikolajeva and Scott (2006), explained the use of framing and how it can help direct the reader to where to start on the page. I have used this idea in my own text in the use of polaroid frames; to keep the theme of a diary. Even though in a previous post I said I did not want to use frames because I wanted the reader to feel immersed in the story, after creating my idea it is clear that the use of frames is more appropriate so the reader can enjoy and laugh at the mishaps in Annabelle's diary. 

Semiotics-wise

In this part of the text I have included;
- sound effects to emphasise what is going on; for example the sound effect of children to remind the text is set in a school
- picture in the background - to show that the text is set in the school's dinner hall
- red - red bottle of "poison"; red means danger, but it reality it's a red bottle of tomato ketchup both recognisable by the reader

References

Nikolajeva, M & Scott, C. (2006) How Picturebooks Work. London: Routledge

Genre and Intertextuality

Genre

In the dictionary, genre is defined as 'a style or category of art, music, or literature'. According to Carolyn Miller (1984); 'the number of genres in any society... depends on the complexity and diversity of society’. Therefore genre develops alongside society, with the increase of technology and the media, genres have expanded to not only comedy or romantic, but now we have 'romcoms' which is the mixture of both.

The genre of my multimodal text is Children's Fiction; this genre includes child appropriate content. The fact that it's fiction means that it can include realistic fiction; an event that could not happen today but may happen in the future, for example; man being able to go into space would have been realistic fiction back before the 70's. It can also include non-realistic fiction which is an event that could never happen, commonly includes technology that is impossible to create or another type of life form, such as an alien. 

The reason why my text is children's fiction is because it includes child appropriate content so it includes imagination, also fiction such as an alien and a dinosaur. It is also set in school which is recognisable to children with characters such as a dinner lady, head teacher, teacher and librarian which a child grows up with, therefore the setting is very relate-able to a child. 

Intertexuality

Nikolajeva and Scott (2006) describe intertexuality as referring to 'all kinds of links between two or more texts: irony, parody, literary and extraliterary allusions, direct quotations or indirect references to previous texts'. In this sense then my text does contain a case of intertexuality as during one of the scenes Annabelle; the main character, discovers a snake in the girls toilets so decides to attack it, which ends up the headteacher catching her and another student wet through. To try and show the attack without words I decided to use a clip from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets where Harry has to kill this huge snake, by using this clip it adds irony and parody to the text because I am relating the imagination of a normal school girl to the story of a magical wizard in the School of Hogwarts of witchcraft and wizardry. By adding a video clip to my presentation also ensures that my text is a multimodal text; a text with many different types of material which produce meaning; for example a red picture to show warning or loud bang to show an accident.

References

Miller, C. R. (1984). “Genre as social action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70(2): 151– 67

Nikolajeva, M & Scott, C. (2006) How Picturebooks Work. London: Routledge

The Characters!

The Characters,

Main Girl: Annabelle

The Dinner Lady

The Headteacher

The Librarian

Mum

The Teacher

These characters have developed from the layout of my story which I described in a previous post. When drawing these characters at first they were sketches without colour, I decided to add colour to keep the theme friendly for a child to read. It also helps as it differentiates between the characters, especially when there are two pupils wearing the same uniform in a scene.

Another use for adding colour to the sketches was influenced by the idea of semiotics; for example in one of the scenes; Annabelle has seen the Dinner Lady add some sort of sauce into the children's food, Annabelle believes that the sauce is dangerous/poison and that is why the bottle is red because red is commonly known as dangerous. But in reality the sauce is tomota ketchup, which is also commonly identified to be in a red bottle.