Ethan Jusino
Prof Perry
Eng 2150
To introduce this reflection paper I would like to say that it was a pleasure to actually do this, turning an old piece of work into something new. The project I chose was the most recent one. Since I had a lot of the information on the woman in red that I chose, which was Celina Acosta Vice, I decided to do a podcast of my essay. Explaining it in my own words was not easy and in fact it was quite difficult because I decided to wing it by reading certain things off my essay paper which I know I did really well.
Overall while deciding on what to use for my multimedia project I ultimately thought about who the intended audience was, I was thinking beyond the classroom so with the tone of my voice I tried to keep in informative. However I know I couldn’t do that without sounding like a robot so I did also try to slightly change the tone as well which would make it more interesting. I knew that it would be anyone that had the ability to find this podcast and listen to it on Spotify. Now the purpose was to educate people on who Celina Acosta Vice was and what her life was like, to show people that her accomplishments were very undermined because of the fact that pretty much everywhere you look to try to find her name it is either erased or forgotten. It is a nice look back in the history of women and how their achievements were almost fully forgotten based on their looks.
Now the difference between choosing the Black Panther Party versus making the Wikipedia project was more of the creativity to it based on the information that we have researched and put together. I really decided to choose the Wikipedia project because I built that from the ground up. I had to find as much data as possible for it and then create an article for it. It was fine at first due to the fact that I had been able to use all of my information to form a nice little article even if it ultimately got deleted. Why did I choose to do a podcast though? Well the answer to that is simple, I just really wanted to sit down and talk about this person for as much time as I could. Just sitting back and relaxing with music and putting on my educational/ relaxed tone of voice really made the experience easier for me. It allowed me to focus more on actually getting the information out there rather than worrying about how I sound and what I look like. Not that I am self conscious, it just makes life easier to be faceless. I listened to podcasts before I even had the idea to make my own and it was always really interesting because of the fact that there was either one person talking or there were multiple people. After listening to around 30 hours worth of podcasts I discovered that either the independent or the ones with one or two guests worked really well.
The benefits of using the multimedia format allows for many different views to be explained differently. Like in my essay I talked about a small amount of her work before Acosta Vice became a politician, but in my podcast I talked more about it and how she was really struggling keeping her life stable because of the lack of opportunities. In addition, during my podcast I described why she kept going just a bit more so than in my essay because it was easier to fathom the words to speak instead of the words to type it. It really comes down to which types of media is used as well because infographics are really good as well when paired with little pieces of text as well.
Due to how quickly this project came after the previous one I ran into multiple issues. Having run through a few scripts for the video essay that I scrapped completely because it just did not sound like me at all. I am more of a natural speaker and I sort of don’t like scripts because of the lack of variety in tone of voice. When reading off a piece of paper for me it is more robotic and less enthusiastic which is what I try to avoid entirely. My voice can be very soothing which I feel is good for a podcast, my friends also listened to the podcast and they were like my voice is really nice and the music in the background only made it better. If I had done let’s say infographics , I would have been able to include a bunch of photos related to the time period and Acosta Vice herself. However I just could not get it to work at all. So having some experience with podcasts I knew what I could include. It was not like I just did a one and done thing though because some of the audio files got corrupted so I then had to redo the entire 6 minutes of the podcast and try to remember what exactly I said word for word. So even though I had known what I was doing when it came to the podcast option, it did challenge me just enough to almost consider doing something else completely.
Finally , to better demonstrate why I made it public on spotify is that it is a very popular streaming service and easily accessible to anyone on practically any device. I could go on my playstation and load up spotify and just play my own podcast if I want to. It is not about me though, it is about the audience of people I want to listen to and to put it simply that is anyone that likes podcasts about people. Whenever I am on the train in NYC I’ve noticed that there are a bunch of people that actually listen to podcasts and some of them I have never even heard of. This piece of work is made for anyone that really wants to view it, which can be from a college professor all the way to a highschooler that wants to learn something interesting.
In conclusion I understand that the way I use my voice and change my tone allows for a better experience because having one voice is not really enticing. Also choosing a podcast was a smart decision by me because I had background music that really fit with my voice, it also helped me get my point across in a different way. There were many constraints when it came to it like how the platform worked and what other options I had. As well as having full control in creativity. Lastly the audience was arguably the most important because everyone is on their phone now listening to anything.
