Use the multimodal narrative as an opportunity to teach rhetorical choices.  

In order to analyze the final product fairly, it’s important to address what did and did not go into my narratives.  The interview with my grandfather for my audio project lasted about 35 minutes.  Of that, only about a minute and 10 seconds made it into the audio project.  The video project was even less of a sample of the actual interview.  Originally, I had intended my video project to cover the same period of history that my audio project had—from my great-great grandfather down to my children.  To meet that purpose, I invited all of my grandfather’s brothers and sisters who were still living (5 of them plus spouses) to my house one Saturday for lunch and the chance to reminisce.  They talked for 2 ½ hours before they ran out of things to say.  Of course, they weren’t always on the topic I had wanted them to talk about, but much of the time they were.  When I realized that my project was going to be much too big if I kept it this broad, I narrowed the video project down to a focus on my family from my grandparents down.  Out of the original 2 ½ hours, only about 30 seconds of my grandfather’s voice made it in to the project.  There was really nothing left out of those interviews which would have changed the audiences’ sense of what my family was like; I simply chose the stories that focused on my grandfather’s remembrances of why a literacy of making and building things by hand was so important to who he is and who he taught his children to be.