Introduction

The Final Video Project for this English 1102 course was about a "Medical Object." In each of the texts we studied this semester, there were several examples of medical objects that either had big impacts or were shaped by their cultural and historical contexts, and therefore are a lens into a larger social issue (similar to the concept of health). This video was about finding a medical object and digging into its historical context within the framework of health and social ideals. I chose to talk about healthcare and how politics has interacted with it by investigating a specific drug called insulin glargine/Lantus.

This assignment was structured as the final medical object video artifact and three preceding process documents. The process documents are a proposal, an annotated bibliography, and a script.

The Medical Object Video

The Project Proposal

The Project Proposal

The Annotated Bibliography

This document came after the project proposal sequentially. It is a small subset of the citations I could have used from my research, and it includes some analysis of each source that was useful in developing my script.

The Medical Object Video Script

This supports the medical object video, and I read off of this for part of the video, but I changed some words slightly version because I didn't like how part of the script ended up sounding.

Goals

Recursive writing was a big part of creating this artifact; the four layers in the process documents achieves the Process Outcome with repeated editing of similar ideas and an incorporation of research into the process rather than something occurring before the formal process. The Project Proposal includes a segment about what research needs to be done for the annotated bibliography and the script, which is putting in writing the process of discovery and of analysis. The assignment asks us to write out this proposal and then the annotated bibliography because it requires us to focus on research and a filming/design plan. This focus means that the final product will probably have better-filmed and -researched content. This is a synthesis piece, and the research is meant to be very broad, so I observed several different disciplines and genres, and the medical studies varied significantly from summary histories and newspaper articles. I was able to use these different accounts, which were all biased towards reporting different parts (medical histories preferred medical breakthroughs, newspaper articles preferred sensational statistics) to build a cohesive narrative around insulin glargine.

Audience

The audience is the general public, including my peers at Georgia Tech. This means that I'm not talking to an expert audience and can assume very little knowledge about my topic like I would on an essay about a book, so I need to explain a lot of the topic. Most of the video is just this, me explaining the eventual development that led up to genetically modified human insulin, but I do have a "take." This bias is deliberately embedded into the storytelling and it's why I talk about patents so much even when I'm mostly describing the technology's development. Furthermore, this means that the product should be engaging. A general audience isn't going to sit through a boring technical summary like a niche audience might (although it should still be avoided), and I tried to achieve this with my nonverbal tone and body language. Editing made sure that my speaking was decent and that picture asides broke up more monotonous bits.

Purpose/Prompt

The final project asks students to create a 5-minute video (I created a 7-minute video with a 1 minute end card) that explains a medical object we haven't discussed in class. "Object" is a really broad category, including procedures, techniques, devices, medicines, models, or breakthroughs as long as they are medical. Originally, I was going to talk about some medical device because there is a lot of injustice perpetrated by companies on medical devices and information security, but I learned that the FDA has allowed researchers to test implants with DRM for security, which weakened my case. However, I still wanted to talk about exploitation, which brought me to insulin, "the poster child for [over-priced healthcare]." I chose to work on this project alone, and created a product that explains what insulin glargine is (I used historical context to do this), how it works, how it is used, when and how it was invented, and the significant contexts that led to its development and its current form (in insulin's case, patents and massive conglomerate mergers).

Design for Medium

I used the video medium as an extension of a presentation where things can be performed multiple times and modified after their performance. I "performed" the script in more of a news-show style than the video-essay type I was looking for, but this is still a common trope within the medium, so audiences are comfortable with this sort of presentation. I also used a couple of video essay tropes like section breaks and overlain photos because I want there to be a sense of consistent chronology even if I jump around some due to some changes happening around the same time or being larger trends of years or decades. I don't have any self-made visual content, so the principles of design (the symmetry, alignment kinds) are less applicable, but I did choose my background to be mostly symmetric and well-lit and I chose the titles based on the repetition principle. I reused the wall color and the door color (lightened and darkened, respectively, for readability) in the title to keep color consistency.

Revision

On this video, the supporting documents were fairly complete, so the content and citations (when used) were relevant and fairly high-quality. One thing I would have prefered to do with the script or the annotated bibliography is to integrate health more explicitly. I believe that, implicitly, medicine, underuse, and social conditions have a lot to do fundamentally with health, but I believe I didn't sufficiently explore how the norms we have interact with social ideals and society (like the poor). For the video, I didn't leave myself as much time as I would have liked to edit it, and I don't think that it is as appealing as it could be. The solid-color titles are somewhat bland, and even though they're sufficient, a redesign could be nicer looking. Images were also somewhat hastened. I didn't exactly establish a style for image placement, which could have hurt their inclusion, and the images that I included weren't particularly deliberate; most were to break up the monotony of me talking, which is valuable, but I feel that had I searched harder, I may have found a more valuable image set.