Before you really dig into a project, decide where you’re going to work on it. If your project is digital and will include images, audio segments, or movie clips, for example, that workspace is probably a folder on your computer. With multimodal projects, often the different components need to sync with or “talk to” one another. If one file is saved on your computer’s desktop and another file is saved in a “My Documents” folder, the applications you use to compile your project might not be able to find all the files. And you might not be able to find all the files either!
When Marisa Williamson began gathering clips and working on her video project, she created a “Writing Class Project” folder on her USB drive. This was a useful initial storage space for all her files. She put sound files, video clips, and some word processing documents in the folder.
Folder for storage of multimodal project
Fairly quickly, however, Williamson realized that she needed to be more organized—by the time she had twenty files in her “Writing Class Project” folder, she found it was getting harder and harder to sort through all the files and find specific pieces.
She created three separate folders within her “Writing Class Project” main folder—one for music, one for video clips, and one for audio clips. She left her word processing documents in the main folder because they dealt with the overall project, whereas the files in the subfolders were pieces of the larger project.
Folder with subfolders for music, video clips, and audio clips
Video clips subfolder
Williamson’s file-saving strategy isn’t the only way to save files for a major project, but she found that it worked well for her, and it’s a good example of how you can create a file management system for a multimodal composing project.
Related topics:
Keeping track of all your files
Using clear, descriptive file names
Keeping track of versions
Managing your files
Writing with technology