Culminating

Chani Wenjack's story is portrayed differently across various mediums such as graphic novels, music, and websites. Each medium uses different codes and conventions to convey the story's message and evoke emotions. Graphic novels use colors, panel layouts, and close-ups to visualize the story's emotions. Music enhances storytelling through lyrics and tone, conveying a deeper sadness and fear. Websites provide factual information but lack emotional depth. These mediums shape the audience's perception of the story, highlighting different aspects and emotions. Each medium has its own unique way of portraying the message of Chani Wenjack's story. Throughout the story of Chani Wenjack, different media texts have different codes and conventions that allow them to portray the story in different ways. Throughout our exploration, we will examine the details of graphic novels, music, and website storytelling to learn and understand these mediums' unique shape and message of Chani Wenjack's story, revealing different aspects of his experience and inviting us to interact with his legacy in many ways. The story of Chani Wenjack offers a compelling lens through which to explore the way the chosen mediums influence and shape the messages conveyed. The tale of Chani Wenjack, a young Indigenous boy who tragically perished while attempting to escape from a Canadian residential school, is one that resonates deeply with the audience across various mediums. Each medium embeds a unique lens through which to explore the implict and explict message within the narrative. The first medium that I will be talking about is a graphic novel, the original piece that Gora Downie has created. A graphic novel effectively conveys a message through detailed character design, expressive animation, color, and background choices. A graphic novel allows the readers to visualize the main ideas of emotion of a story with minimal words. In a graphic novel of Chani Wenjack, the author uses a variety of colors, panel layouts, visual tools, movement, and close-ups. This can give the reader a different insight compared to a website or a song about this. The colors portray happiness, brighter colors are happier times, colder colors and dark colors are the current depressing times. The panel sizes communicate mood, pacing, and emphasis. The close-ups show how he feels and gives the audience a better understanding of the moment he is currently in. The emotion lines express the movement and the rush of the situation. All of these codes and conventions allow the reader to understand the message of the story through visuals. Any person can detect how he may be feeling throughout codes and conventions I just listed. The message may be portrayed as a dark, scary time, which can give an image to those reading to feel more darkness and that was occurring at this time. Other mediums such as websites and songs cannot portray the same message that a graphic novel does. A song or a website can't portray the same message as a graphic novel and this is because graphic novels express the emotions using different codes and conventions as like panels and colors. A song is more what you hear and a website is more the factual non-fiction that you see. Another medium used for the story of Chani Wengek is through music. Music can give a whole different message to the story. Since the story of Chani Wengek is a dark, sad story to begin with, every medium will give off that vibe, but they all give it off to a different level of emotion. Music has a profound ability to enhance storytelling by conveying emotions, setting the tone, and reinforcing narrative themes. Music can invoke a wide range of emotions from joy and excitement to sadness and fear. By selecting or composing music with different specific emotional qualities, storytellers can amplify the audience's emotions response to the narrative. For example... I smiled at her and laughed and I kept them dry and as long as there were six I'd be fine as long as there were five. In this part of the song, Gore Downie is singing about how many matches he'll be fine with. The way that he's singing and the way that he expresses his voice tone gives a way broader message to the story. It gives the audience an idea of how sad it actually is and the fear of having only seven matches to last a long time. The lyrics portray a message about living in the forest, having only a certain amount of matches for your survival. That kind of gives an even more of an emotional side of things knowing that the lyrics behind this have something to do with a terrible story that happened a long time ago. The way the music in the background was very exciting and loud gave off a different message than the lyrics itself. To me, the music gave off like a happy time. It gave off like you're going to a movie theater kind of time. But then when you actually hear the lyrics and you hear how the music is portraying the lyrics message, you'll understand that the music gives off a different message and the lyrics give off that same message in the end. Using songs to portray different messages throughout this story is way different than using a graphic novel or a website. A graphic novel, you can't hear the emotion behind the voice. I find when you hear someone's voice, it makes the situation so much sadder. When you see someone's face, you can see how they're feeling and their emotions, but you can interpret it a different way. For example, if I was seeing someone crying, I would think it's a sad emotion, but what if the person is actually crying of joy? You portray it differently, whereas a song, you hear the emotions in the voice, plus with his background videos, you also get the visuals as well. As well as a website, you only get the factual information, you don't get the emotion behind anything. A website can't portray the same message as a song because you can't get the emotional side of the voice and the tone that you hear it from. You're just reading the emotion and the tone behind the story. Same with a graphic novel. You can't get that same emotional feel as a song. In that part that I just played, it expresses more of a sad, dark times and the scary times of losing a match. A website can also provide insight to characters' inner thoughts and feelings, revealing aspects of their personality or motivations that might not be immediately apparent to the dialogue or action. In his song, you can hear the motivation. As long as he has only one match, he will be fine, and that motivates him to keep pushing throughout the way. The codes and conventions used in songs may be editing to slow it down or pace it up so that you can hear the emotion behind the music itself, not just the lyrics. In Gore Downie's video, he edited it to be slow at the beginning and all of a sudden gets really upbeat and fast when it's a very rushing movement time. A website is another medium used to tell Gore Downie's story of Chani Wintak. A website gives a different insight of the story. It portrays a message to be more of a research issue brought up amongst the author. However, the Secret Path website gives a message with a different view as to the story. It expresses the story with only words and more of a non-fiction perspective. It doesn't express emotions as much as it expresses the story. It allows the readers to get the story and not be able to read the message behind the emotion, but it gives the readers an ability to know what's happening and what happened in the past. It gives the main idea and uses large words to express the emotion throughout the text. It gives the message more of a research story, a story that happened a long time ago. Not a lot of emotion is expressed to show the true message. It shapes the message to be less emotional and more factual. A song and a graphic novel cannot be portrayed the same message as this because this is more of a research, factual thing, and a more non-fiction thing to give people more of the background information instead of the emotional side of things. All of these mediums and codes and convections allow the readers to view the same story in different ways. Mediums like graphic novels, songs, and websites doesn't necessarily change the message, but more like shapes the message to be differently portrayed by the audience. Graphic novels are supposed to give the listeners a tone of emotion, heard from the voice of the singer, and heard from the sound of the music being able to hear the emotions. Graphic novels give you the visuals to be able to see the emotions, and the website gives you the ability to read the emotions and be less emotional. Songs can only give the emotional side through their voices. Websites can only give the factual side of things and the non-fiction perspective, and the graphic novels will only give the visual-emotional side of things. These mediums can only do that. These are portrayed in the way that they are portrayed and won't be able to do what other mediums can. This is how different media texts with different codes and conventions allow them to portray the story in different ways.