Author's Note

For the remediation project, I had to keep the same audience and the same argument/purpose, I just had to change the medium. For me, that meant I had to keep the same audience as Winnie-the-Pooh (children and adults, alike) and the same purpose (be engaging, informative, and, ultimately, entertaining). These are very strict guidelines and I had a lot of trouble finding another medium besides just strict writing that would work, however I ended up basing my remediation project off a YouTube series called “True Facts About the ____,” with each video giving true facts about a different animal.

The videos have several genre conventions I had to work in or that helped ease my transition to the new medium. First, each video has a dry sense of humor derived mostly from commentary on the animals. For example, in the True Facts About the Frog video, the narrator likens the experience of a frog to how it would feel if humans behaved that way. He also expresses disgust in several parts. Both of these are forms of commentary on frogs that, while different from commentary in my repurposing project, were easy for me to incorporate into my videos.

Also, the narrator uses a faux authoritative tone while still legitimately informing the audience about different animals. This tone is reminiscent of the narrator’s tone from my re-purposing project in that it is meant as the source of truth and knowledge, the difference being the YouTube video is more removed from its subject matter.

However, I had trouble with the genre conventions because my information had to be based on the re-purposing project, which is based on stories and history. This made it difficult to translate to the YouTube video because there is a lot more dry information to cover from stories than facts about animal physiology. I worked around this by pointing fun at the absurdity of Roman mythology, like inserting commentary on the practice of augury. This mirrors the commentary of the re-purposing project, however it is more based on our current perspectives of the silly practices than the re-purposing, in which the narrator still retains faith in Roman practices since he himself is a Roman.

Overall, I try to mirror a lot of the conventions of the re-purposing projects, including the outside commentary and the narrators’ similar tones. The re-mediation medium has additional specifications, including informal length limits, and while the re-purposing is explicitly written for both children and adults, I chose to relax that a little bit in the re-mediation and I include more language than in the re-purposing’s children’s story. There is nothing too over-the-top, and I censor the worst words just like the True Facts videos; however, the True Facts humor is meant for a more adult audience so I had to strike an impossible balance between child-friendly and medium-specific.