Rip Companion Essay

Jean Hyung Choi
Dr. Haas
Writing 39B
3 March 2016
RIP Companion Essay
The text that my group members and I created for the RIP project is a
multi-modal edutainment(education and entertainment) video about the
Japanese folktale titled Kuchisake Onna, and the Korean version of
equivalent story titled Red Mask, and how each story reflects their
rhetorical situation. This video was created under the rhetorical situation that
is bounded by the environment of UCI writing 39B class. The audience for
this video is the students and the instructor of 11am writing 39B class of
Winter quarter 2016. Because the video was created for an audience in
2016, it largely reflects the social background of 21th century, specifically
with its focus on the social values of college students at the age of 18~20.
The audience are known to have thorough prior knowledge on the genre that
is being analyzed in the video, the folk and fairy tale genre, but may or may
not be familiar with the specific stories that are being analyzed. Also, the
audience has a considerable level of understanding about how texts reflect
their rhetorical situation due to their experience in the class, and their
expectations are therefore to see an effective presentation of each groups
understanding of rhetorical situation in the story. Therefore, when creating
this video, my group took into consideration that the audience are largely
familiar with any technical vocabularies that are tied to fairy tale genre and
rhetorical analysis, and the purpose of the video, but not with the plot of the
story itself. Hence, the focus of the video is largely on concisely introducing
the plot of the story, and effectively describing how the rhetorical situation is
reflected in the story, without excessive explanations on the genre or the
purpose of the video.
Some specific moments from our video that are particularly created to
reflect the rhetorical situation are the following: incorporation of video clips
from the horror movie version of Kuchisake Onna, the equation to analyze
the convention of evil spirits in Japanese folktales, and statistical evidence
to support a claim. In order to make the video appropriate for its genre, we
incorporated some clips from the movie version of the story in order to
explain the story plot, instead of simply narrating it or showing it through the
text. Such use of video clips contributed to the genre definition of our video
as a multi-modal text, for other parts of the video that contained analysis of
rhetorical situation largely consisted of drawing, text, and narration, instead
of video or pictures.
*a scene from the Japanese film version of Kuchisake Onna (https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=WRaId4SiomY)
Another purpose behind using scenes from a horror movie was to make the
story engaging and entertaining to the college-student audience.
In order to enhance the effect of entertainment that comes from the
horror-theme of the video, we also added background music that was in
another Japanese-based horror movie titled The Grudge. Overall comments
from the audience were that such use of background music and video clips
makes the video entertaining while it contains a lot of technical informative
explanations. Another moment that was suited for the audience was the
analysis on conventions of creation of evil spirits in Japanese folktales, which
was described in the form of an equation A + B = C, where A was weak-
spirited, B was stress from outside, and C was creation of evil spirit. This
mathematical approach to a folktale convention appeals to the audience in
that it analyzes a literary element in a mathematical sense which we all are
familiar with as college students who have completed basic mathematics
education. Also, it serves the purpose of adding humor into the seemingly
formal analytical text, for it degrades the tragic event of creation of an evil
spirit into a simple and elementary math puzzle with the use of a positive
and comic tone.
Last, because the audiences expectations include showcasing our
groups advanced understanding of the fairy tale genre and rhetorical
situation, we included statistics that show the level of research that was
done in order to create this academic video. For example, in the last part of
the video where rhetorical situation of Japan and Korea was being compared,
a statistical evidence regarding Koreas exceptionally high interest in beauty
and plastic surgery was used while supporting the claim that Koreas story
reflects interest in beauty for the rhetorical situation of Korea shows that
they have a stronger focus on beauty while Japanese had their focus on
sacredness of marriages. The statistic that was used was a bar graph of
PP10K, which stands for Procedures per 10,000 person of all ages in a year.
The statistics supported the videos purpose as an academic showcase of
learning by providing the audience with the evidence that shows academic
research was involved in creation of the video.
While creating this video, the work was equally distributed to each
members of our group. The video was split into 3 main parts: introduction to
the Japanese story and its conventions, detailed analysis on the japanese
rhetorical situation, and comparison between Korean version and Japanese
version of the story. I was responsible for researching and writing the script
for the comparison, with my focus on researching the rhetorical situation of
the Korean version of the story. I began the research process by searching for
the original Korean version that was written in 1970s. Then I found out about
the differences compared to Japanese version, which was the reason for the
womans split mouth, which was a failed plastic surgery. Then, I turned my
attention to why plastic surgery came into the korean version of the story,
and moved on to technical research on trend of Korean plastic surgeries and
the origins of Korean obsession with beauty. During the process, I found out
about Korean relation with Confucianism values and Koreas global statistical
place in plastic surgery, which was later incorporated in my part of the video.
I drew my own part of the script on the white board for the filming of the
video, and did the voice over for my own part, also. I also contributed in
writing the script and filming for the conclusion of the video. I also found
source of the video clips that are included in our video, and the background
music.
Works Cited
"It's Official: South Korea Has the World's Highest Rate of Cosmetic Plastic
Surgery, But..." South
Korea Has World's Highest Rate of Cosmetic Plastic Surgery.
AsianPlasticSurgery, 08 Oct.
2003. Web. 23 Feb. 2016.
"History Of The Korean Society Of Plastic Surgery Media Essay." UKEssays.
UKEssays, 23 Mar. 2015.
Web. 23 Feb. 2016.
Adler, Joseph A. "Women in the Teaching of Chinese Religions." Women in the
Teaching of Chinese
Religions. Kenyon College, Winter 2006. Web. 23 Feb. 2016.
"Traditional Korean Marriage." Life in Korea. Life in Asia, Inc. Network, Web. 23 Feb.
2016.

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Jean Hyung Choi

*a scene from the Japanese film version of Kuchisake Onna (https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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