JON CALLOW: So we're interested in ways we can start to explore those. So what I want to do is actually get you thinking about those different modes now. And I'm going to use some popular culture of our well-loved hero, perhaps, for some people, Spider-Man. Now, of course, I grew up with Spider-Man, with the classic cartoon series Saturday mornings, with the groovy song. But Spider-Man has come a long way and gets reborn every few years. So I'm going to take a clip from the most, one of the most recent Spider-Man movies as well. And I want you to start to think about what visual and multimodal features do you notice, as well as any cultural aspects of this text as well, OK? And, then, we'll start to unpack those together. So can we have video on this one, please? [VIDEO PLAYBACK] MAN 1: Different is what makes you Spider-Man. PETER PARKER: My name is Peter Parker. I'm pretty sure you know the rest. I saved the city, fell in love. Then, I saved the city again, and again, and again. Look, I'm a comic book, a cereal. I did a Christmas album and a so-so popsicle. But this isn't about me, not anymore. - Spider-man swings in once a day, zip, zap, zop in his little mask and answers to no one. MAN 2: I love you, Miles. - Yeah, I know, dad. [POLICE SIREN] MAN 2: You gotta say I love you back. - Dad, are you serious? MAN 2: I want to hear it. - Look at this place. - Dad, I love you. - Dad, I love you. - That's a copy. [MUSIC PLAYING] (SINGING) Ladies and gentlemen. MILES MORALES: My name is Miles Morales. I'm the one and only Spider-Man. At least, that's what I thought. MAN 3: You ever hear of the supercollider? You're going to love this. AUTOMATED VOICE: Dimension opening now. - You're like me. - That's impossible. PETER PARKER: All right, kid, listen up. This fry is your universe, soggy, weird, gross. And this delicious, normal fry is my universe. So you want to learn to be Spider-Man? MILES MORALES: Can you teach me? PETER PARKER: Yes, I can. Time to swing. [YELLS] MILES MORALES: I'm doing it. PETER PARKER: Good. You're doing it. Double-tap to release and flip it out again. MILES MORALES: OK. PETER PARKER: Flip and release. You're a natural. Flip. MILES MORALES: Whoa. - Hey, guys. - Who are you? - I'm Gwen Stacy. [MUSIC PLAYING] - I'm from another, another dimension. - How many more spider-people are there? MAN 1: Hey, fellas. - Hello. PETER PARKER: This could literally not get any weirder. - It can get weirder. - OK. We need to get back to our universes soon. MILES MORALES: Brooklyn is going to collapse. My family lives in Brooklyn. MAN 2: Whoa, whoa whoa, whoa. - Miles, what's wrong? MAN 1: This was never your city. It's mine. MILES MORALES: If I don't destroy the collider, none of us will have a home to go home to. PETER PARKER: Remember, what makes you different-- MILES MORALES: Let's go. PETER PARKER: --is what makes you Spider-Man. - Officer, I love you. [LAUGHS] MAN 1: Wait, what? [MUSIC PLAYING] - That way. That way. Other way. Other way. Other way. Other way. - Do animals talk in this dimension because I don't want to freak him out? [CRASHING THUD] [MUSIC PLAYING] [END PLAYBACK] JON CALLOW: Who's seen Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse? Many people. OK. Is fantastic. Can I recommend? It's fantastic for a whole lot of reasons. But that trailer should have got you thinking. And, of course, you might suddenly find, wait a second. I was totally involved in the trailer. I wasn't thinking about visual and multimodal features at all, which is fine, which is why we always need to revisit texts, whatever we're reading. Remember that the foe you make as a beginning teacher, where you read a text once and expect the kids to have got all the comprehension knowledge because you've read it out loud. So you need to go back to it. You need to enjoy it the first time, and then you want to go back and say, oh, did you notice this? Did you notice that? So let me do that for you as now. Now, of course, it was a trailer. So you could talk about text purpose, couldn't you? What's it intended to do? To get you to want to watch the movie. Maybe you're thinking, oh, it's done its job. I actually am quite interested now. Good. Talk about that. The text user role, if you want to think about the four roles of the reader resources as well. What are some of the features are in there as well. We've got, its rapid. You notice that. It's just happening really fast. And some people are like, yeah, that's fine. I'll do with that. Other people are like, it's way too fast. We've got loud and soft. We've got a lot of jump cuts happening in there in terms of the editing, don't we? We've got that really strong sense of movement. This is not one of those films where this sort of pans across the landscape and sort of slightly moves in on a sort of moving stream. It's actually really, really fast as well. And, of course, there were a lot of literal lines coming across the screen that you might have noticed here. And I've pulled out some examples there. So the type of animation used borrows a lot, of course, from comic book because of its history and its pedigree. But it's also using that style of movement and emphasizing it by literally drawing the lines on the screen, which often we see in comic books and a whole lot of other visual texts as well. So it's interesting the way that this is used. Perspective, distance, all of those features are combined to make a really powerful text. And, of course, the lovely thing about many multimodal texts is a six-year-old can watch that and get a whole lot out of it. And a 96-year-old could watch it, but be totally overwhelmed by the sound, and actually be able to tell you things about it. But then, as teachers, how can we use it to explore and enjoy text a little bit more? So let's use some of the meta language now to talk about it. Well, layout is really important. If we're talking about multimodal texts, and we are heading towards thinking about reading in terms of then moving to writing and creating, then layout is a term that's really important, isn't it? Even in the clip there, we had a very comic book-like screen layout, didn't we? So there's a lot of comic book, i.e. graphic novel type features, that were in there as well. So it was interesting in terms of the panels and the use of what we call gutters. So gutters are another element which are really common. And picture books have used gutters for quite a long time as well, of course. But, of course, they give us a sense of how you might divide a page. Now, if you've ever done a collage that you've sent online to your mate online on your phone, it gives you all those layouts. It's like scrapbooking. Anyone does scrapbooking, you lay out your page in different ways. Putting something at an angle creates a different vibe to putting it vertically, doesn't it? Having lots of pictures says something different to having two or one. So, again, all those choices are choices that authors or text creators make that are really important in enjoying a text but also, perhaps, being able to talk about it. Sound, that text-- that wouldn't have worked well without sound, would it? We're really interested in how sound works and how sound effects work. And, again, whether it was loud, loud sounds as well. But we've also got sounds that are often replicated or sort of seen by in the visual text in that movie. We've got the screech of the tires there. We've got the thump as they go through the trees. So, again, this is a great little trailer to pull out some of those multimodal features as you start to think about how they work together. Now, of course, interestingly, we've got speech bubbles and speech boxes happening in a film. And those of you who've seen this film, it's interesting, at some point, where the main character starts thinking and then notices his voice. And, of course, it sort of plays with that idea of actually we're seeing the words on the screen. And as the words get bigger, he says, wait. Why is my voice so loud? And it's literally written in a large text on there as well. So there's a nice playfulness within this sort of text as well. Sound is really important because it tells us emotional things. And it's not just about sound effects. Can I get our desk to click on the Play button for this. Have a listen to this psychology of sound. Oops, need to go back. And that little sound one, just on the bottom right. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] MAN 4: There's one other aspect of sound that generates fear for our survival. Sounds with lower frequencies tend to be scarier to all animals, humans included. There's a good reason for that. MAN 5: The biggest animals can produce the lowest frequencies. And if you're really small, the lowest frequency you can produce is much higher than if you're really big. If you're small, you're at greater risk by bigger things. So I think animals are likely very sensitive to these cues of body size. And that when you begin listening to horror films or films where they're trying to create tension, often, there's this low frequency that's brought in, this low baseline, these low frequencies that begin creating a sense of unease. And I think that, too, is tapping into our biological roots. MAN 4: Low frequencies are all over scary movies, like the alien tripods from War of the Worlds. [LOW-FREQUENCY SOUNDS] MAN 4: And the distinctive sound of the monster from Predator. [SCREECHING GROWL] MAN 4: And, of course, the theme from Jaws. All of these terrifying film sounds and many more use lower frequencies. [JAWS THEME MUSIC] [END PLAYBACK] JON CALLOW: It's quite amazing that even a film that lots of people haven't seen, they will hear those first few notes of that low music and go, ooh, that's a bit creepy. And those who did see it would have had to think, oh, I'm not going to go swimming today. So we're interested in thinking about how sound works, but also soundtracks. Music is so important, such an important part of our lives now, isn't it? OK. Now, I know, coming from the old days, back in the '80s where we had cassette players, it was referenced before with Jenny, as well, my Walkmans, as we used to know them, and then Discmans in the '90s, when they used to skip. Anyone have a Discman that used to skip? And it used to be annoying when you tried to run. But, of course, sound and soundtracks are so important in terms of not only marketing, but also setting a mood or a vibe for a movie, or a trailer, or a TV show as well. And it was interesting that when before this movie came out, 2017, they actually released one of the singles beforehand as part of getting ready for the film. Now, again, that's part of that is consumerism and selling. But it also shows how music actually influences the way we perceive a multimodal text and whatever. And I'll just play you a little bit of this clip, which is in the bottom right-hand corner there. Notice how some in this music clip by Post Malone, they've taken elements of the movie and put it into a music clip format. So have a notice some of the features there. If you can click on that one in the bottom. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] [POST MALONE, "SUNFLOWER"] Ay, ay, ay, ay, ooh, ooh, ooh ay, ay ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. Needless to say, I keep a check. She was all bad, bad, nevertheless. Calling it quits, now, baby, I'm a wreck. Crash at my place. Baby, you're a wreck. Needless to say, I'm keeping a check. She was all bad, bad, nevertheless. Calling it quits, now, baby, I'm a wreck. Crash at my place. Baby, you're a wreck. Digging in a bad way, losing your grip. Screaming at my face, baby, don't trip. Someone took a big L, don't know how that felt. Lookin' at you sideways. Party on tilt. Ooh, ooh, certain things you just can't refuse. She want to ride like a cruise. And I'm not trying to lose. Then you're left in the dust, unless I stuck by ya. You're the sunflower I think your love would be too much. Or you'll be left in the dust, unless I stuck by ya. You're the sunflower. You're the sunflower. Every time-- [END PLAYBACK] JON CALLOW: So music is evocative and powerful. And, of course, in that clip, they brought all those elements together from the movie as well. Now, not too much more on this. But, of course, that movie is really powerful, I think, for diversity in terms of representations, in terms of the different, not only the spider-people, or the Spider-Men, or the spider-pig, there we a whole lot of ones there as well, but also contemporary settings. Being able to give us some insight and represent different people's lives who, traditionally, weren't represented in mainstream Hollywood blockbuster films and lots of different types of ways. So there's a whole lot of interesting stuff that one particularly brings to us as we start to think about what happens in different people's lives. So having looked at that second section now, we've refreshed some of those multimodal features. We've read text. We've viewed text. We've looked at sound. We've looked at motion. We've looked at movement. We've considered something about color. We've considered some of that meta language-- meta linguistic terms of layout and design. And I didn't use the term vectors, but those action lines that take us through. So all of those features are part of reading, and viewing, and creating sorts of texts.