Robert Ritchie
Eng. 687: Pop Cultural Literacy
Bronwyn
Final Paper

Writing with Video: Anime Music Videos and the Composition Process

Visual Media Matters
	Students are surrounded by visual media everywhere in our culture.  Billboards, movies, commercials, magazines, video games, and many other types of image-based messages are inescapable features of modern life.  Public and private domains are saturated with the image.  Chronicling the so-called rise of the image [and] the fall of the word, Mitchell Stephens claims that “the image is replacing the word as the predominant means of mental transport” (11). The fear that the image has replaced the word has generated much anxiety in education, most of all in the humanities and specifically, the field of English.  Doomsday prophets warn that print literacy will erode, and with it (if you ask some) civilization itself.  
	As a result of this near paranoia about the state of print literacy in modern culture, visual media have been type-cast as the nemesis of ‘true’ literacy.  Naysayers pronounce that all those hours of television watching, and Nintendo button smashing, are dumbing children down.  Others attribute far more malicious consequences to visual media: that our students will become inert zombies, drooling, stupid and unemployed. This is a neat binary, assigning print and visual literacies as mutually and mortally opposed.  That reason alone is enough to be suspicious.  Yet these assumptions linger today, bravely ignoring all evidence to the contrary.  This would not be so much of a problem if these assumptions were not held by mainstream pedagogical thought.  But they are.  More dangerous than the supposed pitfalls of visual media, I argue, would be to set it apart as an other, or worse yet, ignore it altogether. 
	Why is visual media worth thinking about for educators? Look again at those billboards, those films and those games.  Usually, they include words, print.  Maybe those print symbols do not always combine into full sentences, but they remain all the same.  Sometimes, the summer Hollywood blockbuster is the result of a bestselling book, or itself produces a bestselling book.  Less directly, visual media is connected to print literacy through the social interaction that results from experiencing visual media.  When was the last time you told a friend about your favorite television show by using images? Did you take a photograph and show them scenes from the movie.  No, you probably summarized it, even dramatized in a storytelling mode.  However you articulated the experiences, chances are, you relied on print literacy skills to communicate. As Luke and Elkins reassure in “Reinventing literacy in ‘new times’”, “the word and the book are here to stay, but they are being transformed in relation to new technologies” (Luke, 7). It is time to recognize that print literacy isn’t going anywhere and understand that visual media is going everywhere.  Failure to do so is resulting in an erosion process -- the erosion of the relevance of humanities, “By ignoring and stereotyping the vital new vessels of language and imagination, the humanities have placed themselves at the margins of contemporary thinking” (Marc, 38).  Any pedagogy that hopes to prepare students for today’s world had better be aware of this fact. 
	David O‘Brien, in “‘At-Risk’ Adolescents: Redefining Competence Through the Multiliteracies of Intermediality, Visual Arts, and Representation,” argues that today, student cognition, the strategies they employ to understand, relate to and connect information, is located in the convergence of print and visual media structures, in intermediality: “the ability to read and write media that depends on facility in the use of a range of symbol systems (not just print).” The significance of the interaction of print media and visual media is too great to ignore in the classroom.  Print literacy makes communication about and reflection on visual stimuli possible.  If we really wish to prevent students from becoming illiterate zombies, we will recognize the invaluable role print literacy can offer in teaching students how to negotiate and reflect upon visual media. On the other hand, I want to argue here a less obvious point -- that visual media literacy can assist in the teaching of print literacy, that the two are, in modern culture, inextricably intertwined.  To pretend to our students that it  is okay to ignore either one is a perilous maneuver.  How can we possibly believe that the bombardment of visual texts our students encounter has not altered they way they learn, does not fundamentally shape their cognitive frameworks? Roland Barthes noted that “the image no longer illustrates the words, it is now the words which, structurally, are parasitic on the image” (204).  This makes me wonder if print literacy in our students’ lives are not structurally, parasitic on visual media literacy.  
	This essay argues that recognizing that students’ cognitive functions are heavily influenced by the visual media they are saturated with, and drawing on an understanding of the rich resources visual texts have to offer, through popular culture, may make life in the composition classroom much easier.  Now more than ever, we need “to understand how new (and old) technologies . . . place new demands on, create new opportunities for . . . the adolescent and adult learners we teach” (Luke and Elkins, 5).  Popular culture is a rich reserve waiting to be tapped for just this very purpose,  primarily because, as Buckingham suggets, “popular culture . . . offers a heterogenous range of ‘symbolic resources’ which young people use in making sense of their lives and of their positions in the world” (108).  Surely this range of symbolic resources can help students make sense of their classwork. 
	In order to explore visual media’s compositional relations to print literacy, and students’ lives, I want to look at a visual text form that I believe presents itself as an effective tool for the classroom: fanfiction videos.  Specifically, anime music videos.  A visual text form, an out-of-school literacy practice for many adolescents and adults, monopolizing some of the most valuable assets that Stephens attributes to the image, and in many ways mirroring the print composition process, it is my hope that some readers will find anime music videos (AMVs) useful in discussing both students’ relationships to visual media, and because of that relationship, effectively reflect on their struggles and strengths with print.  The following discussion of anime music videos is not necessarily an attempt to promote the idea that AMVs should become part of any curriculum. But I do believe it is important to examine concrete examples of the visual literacies that influence students.  At the very least, AMVs are a window into the ways the students use their composition skills outside of the classroom.  If the reader finds AMVs useful, great -- I hope you and your students have fun in the classroom with them.  If not, I do hope that the reader will take away from this discussion that visual literacy matters in our students’ lives, and has implications for pedagogy that are worth thinking about and incorporating, whatever visual media you decide works best for you and your students.
What the Heck are AMVs?
	Anime music videos are a specific type of what Henry Jenkins refers to as “participatory culture”, a fan-produced product derived from industry-produced anime films.  Essentially, AMVs are video fanfictions, produced by Japanese animation fans. In Textual Poachers, Jenkins notes the pegagogical interest inherent in fan videos: “Fan video is first and foremost a narrative art . . . selected images draw their meaning from pre-existing narratives . . . also mirror dramatic structures in their organization and are structures from the point of view of specific characters” (Jenkins, 233). While AMVs are produced in a variety of genres and styles, in “Popular Music Meets Japanese Cartoons: A History on the Evolution of Anime Music Videos”, Dana Springall describes the one thing all AMVs have in common: “combin[ing] pre-existing anime footage with pre-existing music [usually American] to create a new product – an anime music video” (Springall).  AMVs can be comedy, satire or action, although a great many fall into the category of profiles.  Springall distinguishes between “character profiles . . . [which] focus on a specific character and try to reveal the personality of that character” and “relationship profiles . . . [which] show how two or more characters relate to each other”.  What’s most important for this discussion is that they are self produced, combine images (anime footage) and words (song lyrics and sometimes actual print), and heavily lean towards the narrative and reflective mode.     
Composing Outside the Classroom
	The most exciting quality of AMVs, or participatory culture of any kind, is that unlike most pop culture, which is consumed - a passive activity whether or not you believe reception is a blind activity, AMVs are products, self-motivated compositions - a decidedly active use of both print and media literacy.  When fans produce AMVs, they willingly and enthusiastically engage in writing, something most teachers believe students find tortorous.  Participatory culture products show that students don’t necessarily hate writing, they just hate educators’ approach to writing.  And for those students who do hate writing, in and out of class, AMVs might provide a headway into helping them find out-of-school forms of writing they might be interested in.    
	What’s more, Chandler-Olcott and Maharin, in their recent study “Adolescents’ anime-inspired ‘fanfictions’: An exploration of Multiliteracies”, discovered something that should inspire all composition teachers.  When two of their students brought fanfictions to them to look at, they found that the texts were “higher in quality than the work they completed for class” (560).  In a sense, the girls Chandler-Olcott and Mahar talked with were hiding their true literary skills from the teachers because they didn’t think they were interested, and they couldn’t invoke those skills in class because, to them, the in-class writing was not interesting to them.  I wonder how many other students are labeled as weak writers, but are actually strong writers at home.  Chandler-Olcott and Mahar’s discovery, if nothing else, highlights a failure on many teachers’ part to really connect to their students on a level that enables them.
	The self-motivated production associated with AMVs and other forms of particpatory culture produces many of the results teachers want the classroom to create.  As Stephens predicts, “I’m not suggesting the majority of us will rise from our couches and begin to manipulate moving images. But many of us will” (168).  And what kind of people are the ones rising from the couch to produce AMVs?  In an e-mail consultation with Tim Parker, the producer of the multi-award winning “Right Now Someone is Reading this Title”, I got a pulse on the demographic producing AMVs.  Parker reports, “Most of the AMV creators I know personally are in their twenties, although definitely many are done by adolescents or younger.  In fact, a friend’s daughter recently made one, and she’s 11”.  So participatory culture motivates a diverse range of age groups to write, from middle school to college.  
	AMVs are not just a sit-down-spit-it-out exercise either.  Massive amounts of time go into carefully crafting an AMV.  Parker comments on the lengthy AMV production process: “I started Right Now in January 2001 and put it on the web in October . . . The first draft was completed for May . . . [Production] was on the order of hundreds of hours. (between one and two hundred, perhaps?) Some of that was learning about video editing, however.” Hundreds of hours?  I figured AMVs were demanding and time-consuming products, but that figure floored me, and suspect it shocks a few readers too.  I would never expect, or really want, a student to spend hundreds of hours writing a paper for class, but certainly teachers could learn a thing or two from the enthusiasm for the composition process that AMVs generate and indeed, require.  
AMVs and the Composition Process
	Lest a reader scoff at music video literacy as irrelevant, as disconnected from real educational practices, Parker also elaborates on how his AMV hobby has developed skills he uses on the job: “The skills learned in video editing have helped me at work.  I work as a game programmer . . . so I’ve helped them in the video editing and DVD authoring departments.”  In an economy that values visual media skills, it would be downright wrong to insist that visual media literacy is not a relevant component of students’ lives.  Therefore it makes no sense to refuse making visual media a component of composition courses, where students could use the strengths of print literacy to reflect on both the visual media itself and how that visual literacy has shaped their own print skills.
	At this juncture, I would like to move further into specific examples of how AMVs are an ideal medium for connecting visual media literacy to print literacy in the classroom.  Before discussing specific AMV titles and the compositional rhetoric skills they provide, I want to explain the practical and pedagogical reasons for choosing the AMV over other visual media such as television shows, film clips, and mainstream music videos like MTV.  This recommendation only considers media that have images in motion.  Thus comics, magazine advertisements and other such still-image media are not addressed -- they would all be excellent recommendations for the classroom.  
	First, the practical reasons for choosing AMVs over other motion-picture visual media.  AMVs one-up other visual media because of their length.  Since AMVs last only the length of a song, averaging two to five minutes, they are small enough to show in their entirety without sacrificing a chunk of class time.  In fact, their length also make them ideal for showing two back to back for comparative or constrastive purposes.  Additionally, the whole story is told in this brief lapse of time.  Whereas with a television show or a film, the teacher would either have to show clips in isolation, or expend an entire class period (or longer) for exhibition, the two to five minute AMV tells a complete story.
	Second, there are numerous pedagogically sound elements in the AMV.  AMVs are independantly produced, usually by people students’ own age, which might give them a sense of equal authority from which to make confident critiques.  All too often, students are threatened by the authority of the texts teachers ask them to approach -- what high school student really feels confident in criticizing a Shakespear play, or what college student really feels confident in summarizing the central concepts in a work by Derrida?  AMVs level the authoritative playing field, rendering a discussion about rhetorical strengths and weaknesses in an AMV more comfortable for students.  
	AMVs highly incorporate the complex traits Stephens attributes to his idea of the new video, a maximized use of the rhetorical options available to video: “Images strutting by; images bumping up against each other . . . images mixed with sounds that mostly are not synced to lips; images sharing screens with words . . . that reimagine, not merely re-create, the world” (134).  AMVs are definitely, as Stephens celebrates about the image’s strongest element, “A forced condensation of energy” (132). Springall makes observations about AMVs that are remarkably similar to the new video Stephens encourages: “[AMVs] often involve many quick cuts, each clip lasting only a second or so, and edited closely with the beat of the music or lyrics of the song. Action AMVs often entail many effects, such as split screens and different clips made semi-transparent and layered on top of each other”.  Every rhetorical element the image has to offer can be found in AMVs, insuring that rhetorical analysis of AMVs will be richly reflective.
	A reader might legitimately ask at this point why I am discussing AMVs when a much more obvious choice would be MTV or VH1 videos.  The main reason why AMVs are more useful than mainstream music videos lies in the consequences of the driving motivations behind the MTV-style video and the AMV.  Basically, AMVs are narrative in nature while mainstream music videos are not: “MTV . . . is about style and sensation rather than meaning, about affect rather than cognition, about performance and spectacle rather than narrative . . . the visual images often have no meaningful connection to the words of the lyric” (Jenkins, 233). Opposed to the illogical succession of images in most mainstream music videos, stands fan videos, which “demand the active participation of the viewer as a precondition for making meaning of their quick yet logical procession of images” (Jenkins, 237).  MTV videos are designed to promote the artist primarily; other considerations are purely periphery.  However, the producer is absent in AMVs; the lyrics and image are intimately related; the narrative drives the video, rather than artist promotion.
	One assumption I will make about students is that they are more adept at understanding and talking about visual media composition than print composition.  I believe they can read visual texts with greater confidence and ability. In Cultural Studies Goes to School, Buckingham argues that “writing serves a ‘metacognitive’ function, making explicit those cognitive developments which are largely implicit in the production process” (160).  Fostering metacognitive abilities is the central goal of the composition class, and I believe students can discuss visual texts on a metacognitive level more readily than print texts, coming to know, or already knowing but articularing, more easily, a skill we want to then advance in print writing.  At the same time that students can approach visual texts easier, AMVs would be highly suitable in pushing them out of their comfort zone, in between the familiarity with American media and the discomfort of print.  AMVs would push students out of their comfort zone for two reasons: 1) AMV images are lifted from Japanese texts, and are more likely than not to be unfamiliar to students; the only anchor many students will have when approaching an AMV would be the popular music the AMV is set to, and 2) AMVs are ripped from the context of the show they pull images from, so unless a student has seen the entire work an AMV is composed from, they will have no ‘inside knowledge’, no predetermined meanings will be available.  The result is that students will largely approach AMVs with absolutely no context.  They will have to struggle for meaning by relying on their visual rhetorical skills, as they have only the unfolding narrative - the relationship between the image and the song lyrics - to anchor meaning and interpretation to.  Students can then discuss in class, and write in print, what they thought the AMV meant, a conversation that should naturally include metacognitive reflection as students try to explain how they reached the interpretation they reached.  They can then critique what effects worked for the narrative, and which ones didn’t, confronting the AMV producer’s compositional techniques and decisions.  Stephens writes about the new video: “This new video . . . should also sometimes be difficult to watch. It can be expected to require and reward effort” (Stephens, 199).  I believe that AMVs can create just this kind of atmosphere: difficulty and reward.
	Next I would like to focus a little bit on some specific AMVs, to provide some of the breadth and depth AMVs have to offer rhetoric and composition.
Doki Doki: “Right Now Someone is Reading this Title”
	Set to Van Halen’s “Right Now”, AMV producer Doki Doki’s (Tim Parker) video combines a number of interesting elements.  “Right Now” stands out because it is in the minority of AMVs that incorporate written text into the video.  In this case, composing required a command of print writing, and the relationship between lyric, print and image is emphasized.  The print writing is the structural backbone of the video, connecting the images directly to the theme of the song, while at the same time, demarcating individual scenes by content and transition.  The repetition of the words ‘Right Now’ define and unify the theme throughout the video.  Parker emphasizes the drafting and selectivity that went into the final draft: “For every line in Right Now, there’s at least one other that didn’t make it in.” Thus meticulous planning and revision went into constructing a precise effect from scene to scene: “Before laying down footage, I time the song and mark everything (lyrics and bars and beats), so things are relatively straightforward once I find footage.”  There is much resemblance between this activity and print word economy, diction, and prewriting. 
	“Right Now” is also one of the minority videos because it does not have a linear narrative that follows a character or even one anime.  Parker instead draws from a range of popular animes from different genres, even sprinkling in real video footage and non-anime sources.  Under these conditions, it is easy for an AMV to lose focus, which makes the decision to anchor the scenes to the repetitive print frame ‘Right Now’ more effective.  Parker uses the diverse collage to appeal to a broad audience.  The decision to pick a universal anime audience also risked making the piece lose focus, but this time, the decision matched Parker’s narrative thread: a celebratory survey of human experience from interesting, high-emotional human moments to mundane, ordinary experiences. In this case, intertextuality, a skill Chandler-Olcott and Mahar attribute to one of the strengths of fanfiction, holds the narrative together.  As a result of having an easily recognizable thread, the video is enjoyable to fans who don’t know the references (they still get many of the jokes), but also offers moments of nostalgia for those who do.  Related to audience, and the importance of audience, Parker humorously observed an incident involving the explicit sexual scene near the opening: “The ‘hand down the pants’ scene in Right Now, however, was too much for Anime Expo, however, and I had to send them another version with a different scene.”   
	An interesting subtext to “Right Now” involves several juxtapositions that comment on globalization and cultural conflict.  First is the scene with Vash the Stampede from the anime Trigun facing off against the American cartoon heroines, the Powder Puff Girls.  The non-fan viewer will understand the conflict, but only the fan would notice the small detail that Parker has picked an image of a resting Vash, but intense Powder Puff Girls -- perhaps a critique of the resistance mainstream American culture has against cultural codes that Americans are conservative about but Japanese are relaxed towards.  Not to worry though, this comment is more explicitly stated later during the “RIGHT NOW PEOPLE ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT NUDITY IN ANIME” scene, followed by the rather blunt scene “RIGHT NOW IT’D BE NICE IF THEY’D SHUT UP”.  Parker ranks juxtaposition with the three most important elements of AMV composing.  It is interesting that he ranked writing as the first and most important element of a good AMV.
Cevat Kose [Nincube8 on animemusicvideo.org]: “Memories of Kidd”
	This AMV is a little unconventional as the video rips are from a video game rather than an anime.  This is not uncommon because the Japanese anime and video game industry have an intimate cross-over appeal;  the characters in the sequence have an anime look to them.  Set to the music of Linkin Park’s “In The End”, “Memories of Kidd” is a relationship profile of two main characters in the game Chrono Cross, Serge and Kidd.  This AMV is particularly interesting because it is the producer’s first AMV.  “Memories of Kidd” gives us the AMV equivalent of a freshman composition writer -- a composer desperately trying to mediate unfamiliar conventions, sometimes showing impressive skill, at other times fumbling. 
	The image-to-lyric synching is really good most of the time, making it possible if not easy for the viewer unacquainted with the characters to understand the narrative thread.  An early transition, when Serge is on the beach and two lines imitate a clock in fast-forward, matches the song’s rhythm and the theme of both song and game.  In other spots though, the transitions are jumpy or downright distracting.  The use of fast-cutting at the top of the first minute is one of the highlights of the video, communicating an intense anxiety. The tension releases effectively as the video transitions into the slow tracking of Serge at the prow of a ship.  
	“Memories of Kidd” would be a good choice for in-class discussion for two reasons.  First, it has easily identifiable strenghts and blatant weaknesses that students could pick out with little difficulty, but which lead to interesting parallels in print writing.  Second, while the rhetorical successes and failures are easy to discern, the storyline is more buried, forcing viewers to really reflect on the relation between images, and image to lyric.  This is a video that would put students’ visual rhetoric to the test, probably requiring several playbacks of certain scenes as students go back a second and a third time and approach the AMV with an active metacognition, really concentrating on how the relationships fit together.
Big Big Truck: “Failed Experiments in Video Editing”
	“Failed Experiments in Video Editing” is an aberration in the AMV community because it uses multiple songs, pulls video from multiple animes, even incorporating hand drawings and print text.  Yet, even though this AMV is decidedly atypical, and does some interesting things with print/image relationships, it is interesting in ways that are different than most AMVs.
	First, this AMV is self-reflexive, metacognitive about the struggles of AMV production and AMV conventions.  Essentially, this AMV emphasizes revision, and I believe the tone of the video opens up a way to re-vision revision in the composition classroom.  The narrative follows the quest of a novice AMV composer to create the best AMV ever.  From lack of planning, to incomplete planning, to terrible execution, the frustration the main character has with composing closely mirrors the frustrations students have with their print writing.  Intermittently, anime characters pop up to say “ . . . YOU SUCK”.  The heavy criticism of her peers, the sense that she failed miserably and is a terrible AMV composer reflects the experience of student writers. Yet, the humorous and playful tone offers a helpful perspective towards the revision process that teachers can bring to the classroom.  The video emphasizes that the revision process itself is playful, opening opportunities for creativity and experimentation with form.  The problem many students have with revision is that they misconceive the need to revise as indicating that they are bad writers, that criticism is a personal attack.  If teachers taught students to approach revision with the attitude it is dealt with in “Failed Experiments”, I believe students might arrive at a more positive and enabling view of the revision process.  Revision, as treated in the AMV, should be seen as play and opportunity.
Koopiskeva: “Euphoria”
	Synched to Frou Frou’s “Must Be Dreaming” and pulling video from the anime series RahXephon, “Euphoria” is a visual wonder.  A complex relationship profile, “Euphoria” is extremely difficult to follow because, while the video transitions and moves in perfect time to the music, the lyrics are not very helpful in accessing the narrative.  Following “Euphoria” is a demanding task because of the lightning speed fast-cuts, the multiple layers of images that transition in and out on top of each other, and intricately subtle relationships between images and scenes.  “Euphoria” is so visually busy, it would take anyone several replays to begin seeing the layers of relationships and patterns that tell the story.  This AMV draws on many rhetorical elements: character introduction, multiple types of transitions, the juxtaposition of color of black-and-white, varying cut speeds, the use of shaky and stable movement, juxtaposition, pans and zooms.  So much goes on in this video that it both demands and rewards several careful viewings. I won’t say too  much more about it because I am still trying to unlock the story.  Every time I rewatch it I see narrative cues I missed in previous viewings.  
Final Reflections
	While it is certain that teachers need to be more aware of the kinds of writing that students actually do find valuable and relevant, the point may lie elsewhere than herding all of the students’ interest into the classroom to salvage in-class success.  Perhaps what is needed is a new angle on what the classroom ought to be.  Too often, the classroom is glamorized as a battlefield where teachers struggle to wrestle students away from the dumbing forces of mass culture.  Educators often believe the classroom is the last domain for bringing the wonders of print literacy to students, that while students are in school, they must be shown the light!  Certainly, some students have had terrible experiences with writing and need to be shown that writing is a valuable form of expression and communication.  The problem is, teachers forget that more students than we realize already know this.  
	While teachers are in the classroom talking about how they’d see how wonderful writing is if only they’d turn off the radio, television and control pad, and pick up Hemingway; the students are already writing, whether it be keeping a diary or producing AMVs, often with a technical and artistic excellence teachers never encounter in their school work.  That knowledge could be imported into the classroom, aid in the work teachers want them to do in addition to their personal writing, but teachers often construct such an oppositional attitude towards students’ mass culture that students just keep silent.  They keep writing and teachers keep preaching; no communication takes place.  Some resentment may grow in the students, and some despair in the teacher.  In a worst case scenario, the student may even come to hate writing so much that they lose interest in out-of-class writing.  Whatever happens, no real teaching takes place and no real learning takes place. School continues to be just school to them, separate from their lives and nothing but a required chore.  Their lives continue to be the enemy to the teacher.  They go home and do the kinds of things teachers want them to do in class, sometimes with reflective practice, sometimes without it (because that is something they can get in the classroom that they may not get elsewhere).  Those who go on without reflective practice may continue to write for years without improving.  Those who do use reflective practice continue to improve their writing, but maybe not their grades.  A student may come in to class and bomb the Hemingway test, but go home to produce the next “Euphoria” or “Right Now” of their chosen media.  The student might win awards with this text, smiling wrily when his English portfolio assessment informs him he is a novice writer. And the two types of literacies, the English portfolio and the music video, which were always one and the same but never treated that way, miss the chance to buttress one another’s metacognitive potential
	But why insist this pattern continue?  Instead, let’s stop making the classroom the print literacy purity filter. Teachers need to “engage with students’ own experiences and discourses” (New London Group, 88), and those experiences are already and increasingly centered around visual media.  Rather than lament the death of a print literacy that never really disappeared, let’s make the composition classroom a reflective space where real learning can be exported to the real lives of students, whether that knowledge be exported in the form of a Microsoft Word document or an AMV.  Popular culture needs to be understood as a point of access rather a barrier to success.  If we do that, the classroom can be a place for engaging the literacies that matter in students’ lives, and -- teachers may cringe at the thought -- just might matter more. 	

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