Creative Writing - Flor Ferreyra, Ailín Madio & Juli Scalerandi.

By jufloai | View this Toon at ToonDoo | Create your own Toon

We chose "My Son The Fanatic" by Hanif Kureishi because we all agreed that it is a particularly interesting story, dealing with thorny isseus such as racial discrimitation, migration, identity and religion, among others. As we are not proficient technology users, the selction of the tool was an arduos task. We inclined ourselves to work with Toondoo because we thought it would be more user friendly than the others, nonetheless we have encountered many difficulties which we were able to sort out successfully. We hope you enjoy our final product.

The first scene we depicted is the one in which Ali goes to the mosque with his belongings in order to donate them to the charity. Here, we can learn about the character's inner thoughts when he says that capitalism has dragged him into materialism, but luckily his faith and the Koran saved him from living a sinful and consumerist life.
In the second cartoon strip, we pictured Parvez and his sinful actions such as smoking and drinking alcohol while wondering whether he has made a mistake as a father that could have pushed Ali into this ardent fanaticism.
In the third strip we portrayed the final scene in the story. In this scene Parvez, feeling absolutely helpless by the situation, hits Ali. Also, we showed Ali's defiant and at the same time victimising attitude asking his father: "So who's the fanatic now?"
In the final strip we included an absent scene that we decided to add to the story in which Ali, unable to put up with his father's sinful attitude, leaves home.

Creative writing: 'My Son the Fanatic' 

by Romina Garnero and Melisa Lecuona

Working process

It was quite simple for us to make a decision with regard to the tool we were going to employ as we wanted to work with one that we had never used before, in order to learn about its use and acquire another tool into our repertoire. Besides, we thought that using a comic strip lent itself to the use of irony, and the fact that we could express the characters’ thoughts and recreate the dialogues easily made us reach the final decision. We have chosen the short story ‘My Son the Fanatic’ by Hanif Kureishi because we found it really interesting and despite its short length it addresses important subjects such as: identity, hybridity, migration, religion, family bonds and roles, loss, assimilation, segregation, among others. After settling the tool (ToonDoo) and the text, we selected four scenes which are determining to the understanding of the plot, though we decided to focus on the thoughts the characters might be having at that moment. The first strip depicts an untold scene, which could be thought of through Parvez’s dialogues with Bettina and his work colleagues. Ali is praying on his mat with all his possessions packed to be given away. We imagined that he could be asking Allah for his father’s salvation. At this point we depicted him as letting his beard grow but not fully and without a taqiyah (the Muslim cap), as he has not revealed his choice yet. The second scene is not told by the narrator but is mentioned in Ali’s dialogue with his father. We focalized our attention on the thoughts each character could be having at that moment, contrasted with what they could be saying. The actual speech was recreated by us. We decided to include Ali’s mother and the divergence between her thoughts and actual speech, though she does not have a voice in the story at all, and she is just mentioned twice as if she had nothing to offer to the story. Thus, this led us to include her to make her a participant, showing in her actual words her submission to her husband while using irony to reveal her thoughts.  

The third and fourth strips show events mentioned by the third person narrator which also include direct speech. In both we have recreated the dialogue except for the final utterance which is taken from the story and is therefore highlighted in a different colour. We decided to keep it as it is because it represents the name of the story and besides changing it would have caused a different effect probably. In these strips Ali’s appearance is changed representing his choice for the Muslim religion and culture and his rejection towards his father’s way of living.

Tool description and conclusion

The use of ToonDoo has proved to be quite simple, even though we faced technical issues when trying to download and see our final product. We believe it is a very useful tool and despite the problems we encountered, everything was solved eventually and we are proud of our achievement. After learning how it is used by clicking and trying different options, we are going to consider this tool for future use in the classroom with our students. 

Reference: Kureishi, Hanif. My Son, the Fanatic. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.

Creative Writing: Wide Sargasso Sea Trailer by Mailén Sagretti and Paula Rossoli

 B) We have created a movie trailer of “Wide Sargasso Sea”. This novel, in particular, was really interesting for us since through it we’ve learned about Bertha Mason’s past. While reading “Jane Eyre” we didn't get to sympathize with Bertha as she was the person who interfered in the lives of Mr. Rochester and Jane. In fact, we hated her character as she was portrayed as a monster, a demon. Yet, Wide Sargasso Sea provided us with an untold story full of mystery, love, cruelty and obsession, among other things that revealed Bertha’s plight and made us feel pity for her. Creating this trailer was a significant and enriching experience for us. Yet, it involved hard work. The first time we got together, we spent a lot of time thinking about suitable characters for our own version. We tried to look for actors and actresses who physically resembled the major characters in the story. After we reached an agreement, we had to make some research regarding films starring the selected celebrities. We concentrated on three movies: “12 Years a Slave”, starring Michael Fassbender (Mr. Rochester), “A Dangerous Method”, starring Keira Knightley (Antoinette) and “Belle” starring, Gugu Mbatha- Raw (Amelie). We haven’t quoted phrases from the novel. Instead, we chose key events in Antoinette’s life and created short phrases briefly describing those moments to create suspense and to fuel the audience’s desire to watch this film. We also used www.imdb.com to gather information about the actors. 

 C) Once we found the movies, we started downloading several scenes to get the ones we needed. To download the videos we used savefrom.net - an online tool. In order to create our trailer we used Windows Movie Maker. We were acquainted with this tool. Still, at times we faced trouble. At first, we didn’t really know how split images from the same film and put them together. The music was another problem. We knew which song we wanted but it was a video file. So in order to convert the video to an mp3 file we used YouTube MP3. Moreover, it was difficult to add the music we wanted because we didn’t know how to get rid of the music from the original video. Thankfully, with a lot of patience, we managed to get it done. Both tools are really useful and somehow easy to use. A great feature of Movie Maker is that it allows you to save the project and continue with it later on. Finally, to cite all the videos chosen for the trailer we used www.easybib.com. A really helpful tool! We hope you enjoy our trailer! We feel really proud of our own production. Dealing with internet tools can be sometimes frustrating and tiresome. Yet, once you have achieved your goal, you feel rewarded and finally realize there’s a new world to explore behind the blackboard and the chalk. 

 Movies and videos: 

Audreyhepburn652. "Jane Eyre (1983)_ The NO- Wedding." YouTube. YouTube, 4 Feb. 2012. Web. 22 Oct. 2014. 
EpicSiyoth. "Sawano Hiroyuki - Destiny." YouTube. YouTube, 28 Feb. 2012. Web. 21 Oct. 2014. . Film Trailers In HD And HQ. "Pride And Prejudice Trailer HD." YouTube. YouTube, 24 Aug. 2009. Web. 21 Oct. 2014. 
FoxSearchlight. "12 YEARS A SLAVE Featurette: "The Cast"" YouTube. YouTube, 05 Nov. 2013. Web. 21 Oct. 2014.
Lionsgate Unlocked. "Shakespeare in Love on Blu-ray - "His Next Masterpiece"" YouTube. YouTube, 3 Feb. 2012. Web. 22 Oct. 2014. 
MOVIES Coming Soon. "Belle Featurette - Gugu Breakout (2014) - Gugu Mbatha-Raw Movie HD." YouTube. YouTube, 28 Apr. 2014. Web. 22 Oct. 2014.
Mrgreen1066. "Roots: Slaves Working in the Fields." YouTube. YouTube, 8 July 2009. Web. 22 Oct. 2014.
Stagnola. "Keira Knightley in King Arthur." YouTube. YouTube, 16 Dec. 2006. Web. 21 Oct. 2014. Steve Delcourte. "A Dangerous Method, Personal Trailer by Steve Delcourte." YouTube. YouTube, 12 June 2012. Web. 22 Oct. 2014. . Taylor Wirth. "10 Days | The Windward Islands | GoPro HD Hero." YouTube. YouTube, 4 Jan. 2013. Web. 22 Oct. 2014.
VISO Trailers. "War Horse - Official Trailer [HD]." YouTube. YouTube, 6 Oct. 2011. Web. 22 Oct. 2014. 

My Son the Fanatic trailer 2014- Lancioni, Panebianco & Prandi

Critical reading and creative writing

A- Trailer for “My Son the Fanatic”

B-  It took us some time to decide which story we were going to work with. We finally selected My son the fanatic. We first selected the parts of the story we were going to include and then we agreed on three famous actors to carry out our film, which were Irrfan Khan (as Parvez), Dev Patel (as Ali) and Natalie Portman (as Bettina). Then, we made a research on which films these actors made in order to take some scenes from them (“Slumdog Millonaire”, “Closer”, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”, etc). We had some inconvenience when finding the same actor performing different activities, for example, in finding Dev Patel playing football, cricket, studying, etc but we more or less managed to look for other films in which there were similar actors or at least they were not clearly seen.

In connection with the trailer itself, first we show Parvez’ s and Ali’s lifestyles in English society. Parvez portrayed as a Pakistani taxi driver, alcoholic person and a tolerant Muslim. His wife does the ironing and Parvez has intimate conversations with his close friend, Bettina. His son Ali plays cricket, football and studies hard. Then, Parvez’s life takes an unexpected dark turn when his son Ali converts to fundamentalist Islam, leading to a family breakdown and social conflict. We quote some phrases from the story to show a serious conversation between Parvez and Ali discussing about religion and their roles English society. Last, we include a violent scene between father and son and the final words of the story which are “Who’s the fanatic now?”. In this way we want to anticipate that the story begins just there whith Ali’s words.

As regards the bibliography used, we have taken some sentences in direct speech from the story “My Son the Fanatic” such as “We are not in the village now. We are in England. We have to fit in!”//“You’re too implicated in Western civilization”// “You musn’t give up on him”,  images from “Google images” and scenes from the films mentioned above. We used www.imdb.com to get informatin about the films in which the actors chosen have performed.

C- We took those videos from Youtube and we downloaded them with JDownloader in an mp4 format for better quality. We chose a muslim music and some film sounds to add to our trailer. In order to make it, we used Windows movie maker, which is quite simple and easy to use.

Tatiana, Guillermina, Angela

Loverboys (by Lu and Agus)

B- This cartoon stands for the break up scene in Castillo’s Loverboys that has deeply affected the main character of the story. We believe it represents the writer’s intention and  the whole story: it is about love and its universality, everyone can feel identified with a love story in spite of their believes, age and sexual orientation.

We have chosen to represent both the characters thoughts and her actual words as the writer does in the story Loverboys to illustrate the narrative techniques Castillo uses (free direct speech, spontaneous and dialogic narrative).

The first part of this comic strip is set at the character’s bar, the place where she met her loverboy, so as to represent that even though she was leaving him, she wanted him to stay. The second picture illustrates his departure. The background shows how they took different paths, but her position portrays her desire for him to come back and the fact that she isn’t over him. This idea is emphasized by the loverboy as a shadow of the past that is still present in her mind and heart. Finally, we see her drinking to forget him which is completely useless because she’s still torturing herself with her memories.

C- Fortunately, we haven’t faced any major technical problems. Toondoo proved to be simple and very easy to use. Moreover, it has allowed us to create a cartoon which we couldn’t have invented otherwise because of our limited drawing capacity.

Wide Sargasso Sea - Trailer (by Andrea Sanchez and Ma.Laura Straface)

We have decided to create a trailer of Wide Sargasso Sea. The rationale behind our choice is that we’ve really enjoyed reading it since Rhys offers an alternative explanation of Bertha’s madness  (Jane Eyre). What we’ve liked the most about Wide Sargasso Sea is that it gives voice to the Other. It isn't just a prequel. It’s the epitome of writing back to the Empire. Moreover, we consider that it has many important themes that can be fully exploited in a trailer. We watched the BBC adaptation of Wide Sargasso Sea some time ago and we noticed that several scenes portraying significant events of the novel were missing, such as Antoinette’s traumatic childhood, which, in our opinion, is essential to understand her struggle for identity. In our trailer, we’ve tried to prove that our imaginary film version of Wide Sargasso Sea is more complete than the BBC version since it shows the most important features and themes of the novel. To achieve our aim, we’ve carried out research on different movies, documentaries and videos looking for visual content that could help us match those parts from Wide Sargasso Sea that we had previously selected. We’ve looked for scenes in period movies so as to find a couple with Antoinette and Rochester’s characteristics and also scenes from slavery movies in order to depict Antoinette’s past as a child. We’ve joined all these scenes together to create our trailer.

As regards our textual strategy, we’ve selected different quotations from some of the main characters to match each of the different chosen parts of the trailer. To make it more vivid, we’ve used different text-to-speech converters so as to be able to convert the characters’ quotations into natural sounding voices.  Furthermore, in order to give our trailer a proper format we’ve written some lines to sum up what the movie is about and we’ve chosen a distinctive voice to read these lines aloud.  This audio strategy has been extremely helpful because we believe that when watching the trailer the viewer can immediately differentiate the characters’ voices from the voice-over. We’ve done extensive research on this since there are many text-to-speech converters that offer kind of “robotic” voices and our aim was to give our trailer a realistic look.

What’s been really challenging is that, as we mentioned before, there is already a film version of Wide Sargasso Sea but we couldn’t use any scenes from it and we didn’t want to use any pictures either. Therefore, this has given us much scope for creativity. 

Technical comment

In order to join all the movie scenes together we’ve worked with 'Cyberlink Power Director'- professional video editing software. The advantage of it is that it allows you to cut different movies scenes, join them together, and add transitions, effects, music and text. We’ve cut the different scenes we selected from movies, documentaries and videos and we’ve added them to our ‘Cyberlink Power Director’ project. As regards the audio, we’ve recorded the quotations and voice-over (previously converted into audio with different text-to-speech software) with Windows Sound Recorder. We’ve added the recordings to our project together with the scenes. We’ve also added the names of the actors and actresses so as to resemble a real trailer. Finally, we’ve added suspenseful music to create tension.

We really hope that our trailer looks as real as possible since that was our major aim from the very beginning.

Video editing software:

Cyberlink Power Director

Text-to-Speech converters:

http://www.naturalreaders.com/

http://www.oddcast.com/home/demos/tts/tts_example.php?sitepal

http://www.ivona.com

Movies, videos and documentaries:

Bianco E Nero. Dir. Cristina Comencini. Perf. Fabio Volo, Ambra Angiolini, Aïssa Maïga. 01 Distribution, 2008. DVD.

Masterpiece Classic: Wuthering Heights. Dir. Coky Giedroyc. Perf. Charlotte Riley, Tom Hardy, Andrew Lincoln. PBS, 2009. DVD.

Tula: The Revolt. Dir. Jeroen Leinders. Perf. Danny Glover, Jeroen Krabbé, Deobia Oparei. Fisheye Feature Films, 2013. DVD.

12 Years a Slave. Dir. Steve McQueen. Perf. Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Kenneth Williams, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2013. DVD.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte. Dir. Mike Barker. Perf. Toby Stephens, Tara Fitzgerald, Rupert Graves. BBC, 1996. DVD.

The Glass Virgin. Dir. Sarah Hellings. Perf. Jan Graveson, Christine Kavanagh, Brendan Coyle. Festival Films, 1995. DVD.

Slavery in Jamaica-Documentary. Dir. Georgina Harvey. BBC, 2005. DVD.

Witches-Documentary. Prod. Michelle Thibeault. Film Roos, 1996. A&E.

H. Kist. "Bill Viola - Fire Woman (2005)." YouTube. YouTube, 10 May 2014. Web. 07 Oct. 2014.

Clarisa & Paula's ToonDoo: "The Loverboy Writes Back"

The loverboy writes back by ppauorozco | Make your own at www.toondoo.com