Maria Wu Cen

ENG 2150, Dr. Blankenship

26 May 2016

Paper 3: Remix

The Idealized Model Minority Reflection

Now I know why marketing and advertising is extremely difficult. In doing this piece, I had to consider my audience, purpose, genre, medium, and my choices. The hardest part about this project was figuring out where to start. Also, I saw the work that Professor’s previous students did last semester, and that actually set a bar for me. I wondered, “How can I do something like this? Can I even do it?” I doubted myself because it seemed extremely overwhelming. This is a writing class, and we are incorporating a multimedia component to it, which is a step beyond the usual expectations of a writing class.

One of the important decisions was choosing what type of genre to use. My topic is on the model minority, and I was thinking about making a PowerPoint as the multimedia supplement to it. However, after hearing what Professor said about making a PowerPoint, it seemed a bit of a challenge for my topic. A good PowerPoint should have many pictures and as few words as possible. I did not take this route because I thought using this method could mislead my audience into thinking I mean one thing when I really mean another. Also, it would have been difficult to make a stand alone PowerPoint on my research-based paper’s topic about the model minority, and then expect my classmates to understand the topic, without having me there to present it. I considered doing a podcast, but I did not want to explicitly say my argument/thesis. I wanted my audience to use their eyes, feelings, brains, and ears to understand my argument. My third option was to use Wevideo, but something went wrong with my laptop, so I decided to use iMovie instead.

Overall, the process of using iMovie was not hard because I have used it for my other classes. The only difference was that this time I had to make a video. In my other classes, I just had to take a video and then upload it to iMovie to edit it. My writing consultants suggested several changes to my video. The Writing Center consultant recommended that I add captions or labels to the first section of my piece. I showed a series of photos of “successful” Asian Americans, such as Jeremy Lin and Vera Wang.

I wish I was an amazing artist, so I could have drawn my own pictures exactly the way I wanted them and not have had to go through the hassle of searching for ones online. But I am not a great artist, so I took most of my photos from Flickr. I had to put different phrases into the search box to get the pictures I wanted. Most of the pictures that showed up were irrelevant and not useful for my project, but a few were usable. I wanted each of my photos to represent a thousand words. I actually had to brainstorm a lot for this project. It was challenging to find pictures that I needed. I typed into the search box: “model minority”, “successful Asians,” “old lady picking up cans,” and things like that. I spent several days looking for possible pictures to use in my video. I had certain pictures in mind, but I was not able to find the ones that I wanted. So I chose the best ones from what I could find. I took most of my pictures from Flickr, Google (labeled for reuse), and Free stocks images.

After finding some images, I separated them into different groups. The first group of pictures deals with successful Asian Americans. They are meant to show how “successful” Asians and Asian Americans are in the United States, and that there is no racial or social problem within that group. My second section shows a series of images that demonstrate how hard Asian American students and young adults have to work in order to be successful and receive a higher education. My third section deals with how hard their parents have to work in order for their children to live in America and obtain a higher education. My fourth section demonstrates the harmful effects on Asian Americans of living up to the model minority.

Another decision I made was to choose not to use voices–only music and non-vocal sounds. I wanted to challenge myself by only using written words, pictures, and music to get my point across. I did not use a podcast because I want my audience to understand my thesis without me literally telling them what my message is. I first took a few hours to explore the soundtracks that were offered in iMovie. I closed my eyes and imagined what kind of music would go well with the pictures. What did I want my audience to feel? For the introduction part, I used the sound effect “Swing City Long” because I wanted to show that Asian Americans are successful and are doing well in America. In the second section, I wanted to show that Asian Americans are successful, not because they are Asian, but because they study and work hard. However, people do not know the stories behind these Asian Americans. As such, I showed images of families working long hours in sweatshops, laundromats, and restaurants. Parents and grandparents sacrifice so much for their offspring so that they can focus in school and become successful in life. I used a calm and somewhat depressing soundtrack called “Piano Ballad.”

I showed how Asian Americans have to work hard to climb up to where they want to be because they have to live up to this “Model Minority” that actually restrict them into being who they are. One section of my video demonstrates what parents and grandparents sacrificed. In retrospect, my family came here to start a new life for my siblings and me, as explained in my narrative. It pressures Asian Americans to do more, work more, and practice more solely because they are Asian. As shown on SAT scores differences between Asians and Non- Asians, top colleges in America expect much more from Asian Americans.

The purpose of this piece is to get my audience to understand that there should not be any stereotype involved in looking upon something. Racial stereotypes, such as model minority, should not be perpetuated, because they have many harmful effects on individuals such as promoting inequality. I feel that I did very well in picking the right images for my piece. I focused on model minority, instead of racial stereotypes because it is less broad. If my thesis is too broad, then my audience will not be able to understand my message I tried to use less words as possible in my video.

The notable difference between my research-based argument paper and my video is that for the research paper I incorporated my own experience, literally. But for the video, culturally I wanted to show more images to demonstrate my point. For example, my parents had worked in sweatshops and laundromats before. I also included pictures of parents working in restaurants, dry cleaners, and even an old grandma picking up garbage cans.

For the last section of my piece, I incorporated few photos/ poster that perfectly represent my main point. Therefore, I did not have to incorporate any words. I did not have a YouTube account, so I had to make one. It was easy to upload the video, although it took some time since my file was large. However, I had a difficult time in navigating my YouTube account. I first published it as private, but then I wanted to switch it to public. It took a few minutes to figure out how to do that. I feel that it is now ready to be published because I made edits. For my draft, I did not know that I had to put credits at the very end of my videos. After doing a whole-class screening, I got a better picture of what was expected. I felt that my video was pretty decent, but I still had to add my credits page. I definitely have to give credit to all these pictures that I took from online because without these images, my video would be impossible to produce. I also added captions here and there, especially when I was showing a group of images with successful Asian Americans. The difficulty comes down to here as well because my piano song ended with a low tone at the end, and that’s how any presentation should end. Then I had decided that I wanted music in the credits section. So I had to go down the list of sound effects in iMovie, and I narrowed down my choices from hundreds of sound effects to six.

Thank goodness that this is not a technology class, but an English class. During the whole- class screening, some of my classmates really made some amazing videos using other movie makers such as PowToon or Biteable.com. Overall, this project was very interesting and fun. I get to be thinking like an analyst.

Link:

https://youtu.be/GnTft4nLji8