In my memory, much of the work done to create Mr. Secrets was—in its rhetoric—either simple (mention of the Korean War prompted the addition of a Korean War image, first mentions of people or places prompted their matching images) or intuitive (a piece of music just seemed right for the accompanying images or voicing).
But the film’s opening scene embodies, for me, my first real understanding of the affordances of digital media in the creation of the multimedia text I hoped to shape. I wanted my audience to hear the letters in a female voice—to encounter “Millie” first with auditory attention—and to do so while seeing them on the screen. And, as music would be so important a part of the film’s full life, I wanted both voiceover and letter image to be accompanied by it. PhotoShop, digital voice recording, and Audacity allowed me to achieve this triple layering that I felt would immediately draw my audience into the film’s concerns.
The three passages chosen are highly emotional, and immediately reveal the presence of a love story as the film’s center. They and the music fade out about one minute and twenty-five seconds into the film, followed by a silent image of the New York skyline, and then the beginning of my own voiced over script, which tells my viewers when my father traveled from Ireland to America and what he came to do. Then follows immediately an image of my mother and myself still back in Ireland, and my own voiced-over comments on the letters’ actual nature. That comment, of course, is the film’s central surprise—and that surprise is made more vivid and involving not just by being delayed, but by being framed by all that leads up to it: the passionate female voice, the plaintive Irish music, the letter-writer’s clear and attractive handwriting, and the briefly related story of a man separated from his family by the need to begin a working life in New York. For me, this was the clearest demonstration of both the nature and the persuasive power of what Jennifer Sheppard calls “the complex integration of traditional and technological rhetorical practices” (123).