In post-production, I find myself looking over the whole package as a whole package, seeing if I have been successful in creating the “unitary whole” I sought to create in the assembly stage.  I take some time over this, and, perhaps ironically, this is the stage in which I become most visually, as opposed to textually, aware.  During the earlier parts of the process I tend to focus more on text; in this part, I focus on visuals.  I ask myself, “How does this look?”  “Does it look ‘right’?”  I probably focus more on “looks” than “text” in this phase; it may be a belated, yet consistent, reaction to the fact that I haven’t been particularly attentive to the visual rhetoric in the prior two phases.  This, in any case, seems to be the phase where I try to see how all of the elements work together.  One question I ask myself is whether I am, to use a term created by Rich Rice, “schmoozing,” or using “new media elements in uncritical, unreflective, and un-thought-out ways” (Whipple).  

 

This is also, for me, “tweaking” time, akin to the “line-by-line editing” in Murray’s expression of the traditional writing process model. I’ll try even more font and background and design elements (including those in video titles and transitions), meddle with margins, shave unneeded—or so I fancy—seconds off of video segments.    Toward the end of the process---when I either feel myself coming to a conclusion or when I get a little sick of the project—and sometimes these two phenomena are remarkably contemporaneous—I’ll step back and look at it with a critical eye.  This is difficult for me, for I have found that I am somewhat less critical of my visual choices than I am of my textual choices.  I don’t know whether this is a result of a kind of “self-schmoozing,” or the ongoing fact that I’m more familiar with, and therefore arguably more adept in, textual, rather than media-focused, editing. Finally, I give the whole project two or three go-overs to check everything, clicking links to see that they are “live,” testing buttons, viewing the project on more than one kind of monitor to make sure there is some kind of visual consistency between them (I usually compose both text and multimedia on a laptop computer, which necessitates this kind of checking). The final part of postproduction is submission—to the website where it’s destined to go, to the journal editor I hope will publish it, to another editor for revision comments.  And that’s usually it; with multimediation and traditional text, I rarely keep going back to a text once it’s submitted, unless it’s returned by an editor for further revision.