Reflective Piece

Being put into a group of people who were new to you is very different and hard to adapt to. In-group activities cooperation is the key to creating exceptional work. The hardest part about the project was communication, which was caused by the time restraints each other’s classes held. The group I was only met 2 times, which wasn’t necessarily anyone’s fault. Other classes are just important as WRD 111, thus we must treat them so.

            By far the documentaries introduction was the most prize winning. The introduction was catchy, not to say others groups weren’t. Instead of starting with a simple interview, the introduction jumped into activities that the BSU held. The introduction tells everything about a documentary, consequently we nailed the intro into an exceptional documentary. At least we can say so with the time given. However, there were changes that I would’ve made over a longer duration given to complete the task. The transitions between interviews were a little scratchy in the sense they didn’t connect. If more time was an option more interviews could’ve been recorded to help give more options. Going back to the original purpose of the documentary we wanted to find how well/bad the communication was between members and leaders, however with the lack of time not enough interviews were held. If more interviews were held, the documentary could’ve been created giving the impression the leaders and members were answering to each others questions. Again, with more time the transitions, which weren’t all that amazing, could’ve been put together much smoother. Also, more interviews would’ve helped the group’s documentary stay on topic.

            At the beginning when deciding on what to focus on in the BSU I was the one who looked around on the BSU website of UK to determine aspects of the group that were so called “memorable”. When preparing the outline of the entire project, I was given that role. With the role, I created the outline of the documentary, giving each member their role, and creating the transitions for each slide. As an assistant I helped to place the material: pictures, interviews, and slide transitions into the best-fit spot. Being a very organized individual, I organized the groups meetings, generally in the time that best fit the majority of the group.

            I’m a very social individual, being put into a socially quite group was a hard start. When other groups were deciding on their projects, our group would sit there in quite. I would talk and spark conversation as much as possible. I knew without communication the group would never succeed in finishing the project. Ergo, I would always gather advice/notes in class that I would then send to the group. I would ask for everyone to send me advice on what they thought of the idea, again how ironic would it be if our group would have a failure in communication when the documentary was primarily focused on the same topic? If I somehow knew of the group before I was placed in it I would’ve tried to become familiar with each individual to allow no awkwardness once we were put into a group together. When its comes to equal participation, I believe each member including myself gave equal effort. Like I said before with the time restraints of other classes I was having trouble coming to meetings, however I created an email group to help keep everyone up on what has and needs to be done. Even when I couldn’t meet with the group I made sure to email them of my progress and vice versa.

           

Sorry for the inconvenience, however I did have an exam at 1030am this morning and did forget to submit the essay. Hope you understand and have a great summer, also had a great time in class, thanks. 

Documentary Proposal

Proposal

Brandon, Tyler, Brooke, Cameron & Whitney

In the documentary we are proposing, we are focusing strongly on the different perspectives from a leader to a group member towards problems within the organization. Primarily, the purpose of the documentary is to expose the communication failure between members and leaders of the organization. Secondly, or more indirectly we may help inform leaders or members of the other perspective, consequently mend the communicational error in the organization. The documentary will be comprised of different elements and shots to contrast group leaders from members. The beginning will be a very general overview of shots and elements of the groups’ purpose, possibly showing shots of the groups meeting area and of leaders and members. Later in the documentation the groups’ communication failure will be narrowed in on, strongly exposing the differing perspectives to problems from leaders to members. As a more general overall description the documentary will expose how leaders and members perspectives to given problems are assessed.

To complete this task our group has created a planner to abide by to give each member an equal opportunity to participate in the documentary. Due to the unavailability of every member, different task has been given to each member:

Brandon: Interviewer

Tyler: Edit/Cut film

Brooke: Record Interview/Take Shots

Whitney: Contact Group/Create Meeting Times

Cameron: Create Script/Outline

To keep in contact a group email has been set up to document progress within the group. Different task may be more time consuming than others, therefore each member is asked to participate in every task, giving possible help in anyway. This is to help every member feel equal participation is kept.

The documentary has been planned out very well. The main composition will be of the interviewees answering questions asked by our interviewer (Brandon). Shots will be taken of the student center and room where the meetings are held, and also during the interviews. The shots will be mainly medium, comprised of the members and leaders during interviews. If possible during the meeting long shots will be taken to add the background aspect. To help give an overview of the organization, the beginning is very general footage and shots of the groups’ purpose and location. Further into the documentary there will be a symbolic transition or zoom into the main focus or issue of communicational failure among leaders and members. To help emphasize this focus, shots and footage are taken of both members and leaders. In turn to the leaders or members’ responses to our questions, we will have the leaders and members follow up on the others answers or issues noted. All together the documentary will be informative of issues any organization may encounter with communication, however in this case we focus solely on the Black Student Union (BSU).

The documentary is planned to come out very well organized. Each member has been given a part of the project to finish. The time interval to finish the project is fair, giving us enough time to hopefully get into a BSU meeting and gather a little more footage and possibly a few long shots. After said and done, the last part is to incorporate each member’s work together into one final piece to submit.

Schedule:

Friday, March 29^th, 2013: Finished Proposal with task given to each member to begin.

Monday, April 1^st, 2013: Have script finished.

Tuesday, April 2^nd, 2013: Have shots of student center, and meeting area.

Thursday, April 4^th, 2013: Start interviews and have footage and shots combined.

Friday, April 5^th, 2013: Have shots and footage edited/cut to Moviemaker.

Monday, April 8^th, 2013: Have rough draft of documentary together.

Tuesday, April 9^th, 2013: Make final revisions to documentary. 

Top 5 App. Tutorials

1. iMovie
2. Movie Maker
3. YouTube Maker
4. Filtering, Effects, Saturation
5. Framing, Image Composition

Documentary Analysis

The three films use very different styles and all together a different composition. The film with Royce white uses very drastic non-diegetic sounds to help stimulate the actual mood of the scene. Royce also always seems to be the focal point, consequently having many close-ups, or mid-ranged shots of only him. Even though sounds helped stimulate the actual mood, silence was a great friend to this as well. The moment he was drafted him and his mother were shown hugging, but in entire silence, except to hear crying. This would help the viewer understand how stressful Royce’s life is with this condition and how relieved he was to be drafted. However, this video seemed only inform the viewer of how even professional athletes or soon to be athlete can suffer from anxiety.

On the other-hand, the video of Paul’s music collection used very contradicting approaches. The music always seemed to be diegetic in the way where Paul was always aware of the music playing. Lighting was very important in the making, because of the “vintage” idea of his collection there seemed to be this yellowish-green tint over the entire film. This gave the exaggeration of his collection being very old or original. On the contrary to Royce’s video Paul is selling his video.

            Korean Netiquette seemed to be similar to a type of manner or etiquette. In the video I found the subtitles very helpful due to the fact I’m not bilingual. The students were the main focus in the video, while the computers were the main topic. Each picture was a young child or something very closely related. Since the children were very young, and not exactly ready to speak on videos, consequently the video was entirely of the children’s participation in the activities. There was even scene of a man listening to the children singing songs related to the right ways to use Internet.

Thought this was pretty cool!

Scene Depiction

Group meetings have been used throughout the Inter-fraternal community since the first Greek letter organization was founded in 1776, the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Similar to today, these meetings are very important in the fraternity to discuss and solve many issues. This is the main reason for my choice of the scene being during a meeting. I also chose Delta Sigma Phi entirely on my past experience rushing and already being familiar with the active brothers of the fraternity. Even though I’m not an actual brother of the fraternity, they treat me as family, allowing me to hangout at the house, and also attend their events. During the fall semester as a pledge I was not considered a brother, consequently every pledge was prohibited to enter into any meetings. I still recall every Monday coming to the house only to get every actives signature on my paddle. The meetings were generally later in the day, to prevent any class conflicts, because every member was required to be at the meeting. With there being very little room in the meeting area it seemed they never expected every member to attend, which was quite shocking to me at first. Delta Sigma Phi has easily 100+ members, yet no more than half attend the meetings, and still the members that attend are never consistent.

When the time came close to meeting time more and more members pilled into the house, approximately 35 live in the actual fraternity house. Thus, no more than 30 more members come to the meeting who don’t already live in the house. When entering the house each member is met at the door from the cluster of people chatting over a 100 different topics. Surprisingly cops don’t suspect there is a party going on with all the rambunctious activity. The attire for this specific meeting was relaxed, however, there are many meetings that are formal. As I was told as a pledge, “It’s turns you into a man,” were the exact words of the pledge class educator. Particularly tonight the member’s wore any attire they felt was comfortable, jeans or sweats, t-shirts or hoodies, and sneakers of any sort. Ironically, the attire fit the organization perfectly. Instead of being ahead of time, already in their seats and ready almost every member felt the need to wait until literally one second until the meeting began to stampede down the stairs by the dozens. It reminded me of Spain’s Running of the Bulls. After about thirty seconds of massacre every member except a select few were sitting. The last few would join the group a few minutes late, which were the same few every other week. Yet, this problem was never confronted. Sitting in the back gave me a view of the entire meeting area. After entering the room myself I noticed how bright the room was, with green and white walls. This created a very dull atmosphere for me, which made me seem like a kid again. My teachers use to decorate their rooms with different colors to keep kids interested. I always laughed at this concept, yet it seemed to make a lot of sense when sitting in a chair with blank white walls. Even I couldn’t focus on the topic at hand, yet give my attention to some guy talking in front of fifty other guys.

Most meetings I’ve attended have always had a leader or group of leaders to take the role of the spokesperson. However, the speaker usually has the floor, with authority over the meeting. Except, the longer I watched the more I noticed how the entire group controlled the meeting. Without reasoning, yelling out comments to ideas that weren’t in their favor or even holding their own conversations. Since I was a guest, there wasn’t much for me to do except watch the meeting unravel into a mess. It seemed very little work was put into organization of the meeting, consequently showing during the meeting. As the meeting progressed it seemed fewer and fewer topics were being discussed. The attention span of the group seemed almost instantaneous flip-flopping among each other’s conversations, which I mentioned were entirely irrelevant from the topics at hand. The area which normally only fit a little over twenty-five people was now holding a whopping fifty-plus. Tensions seemed to rise directly with the temperature, sky-rocketing. Shoulder-to-shoulder every member sat, breathing, talking, and eating or drinking only to increase the carbon dioxide in the room, which only reinforced the entire concept of Global Warming to me. I’ve learned from different situations, if you group guys too close for too long there is bound to be chaos. The different cliques were easily noticed throughout the room; each having their own beliefs. The only diegetic sound was the mumbling of the group, while I knew on film the jaws theme song would’ve been the non-diegetic sound playing. When a topic came to discussion that was obviously opinionated, I knew someone was about to explode. A common topic discussed is about the pledges. This is exactly where the chaos started. A voice from the left side would yell about how the pledge has been a complete idiot, and rambling about possibly cutting him. While the right side argued the exact opposite, explaining how the pledge has been acting to par and the reasoning for not cutting him. From having the experience of being a pledge I understand some actives will not favor you, while others will go out on a limb for you. The best explanation for this is who you generally hangout with. Luckily, I made my rounds to get familiar with nearly everyone. The discussion at first came very shocking, very harsh comments are made towards pledges. Not saying the active is being irrational, but that pledges have been seen acting in ways that are very unreasonable and have very little explanation behind them. It was obvious the topic was discussed to ensure that every pledge was genuine and possibly a positive influence on the fraternity. One-by-one every pledge was discussed, some very thoroughly for his distinguishing actions or even vice versa, while others were skipped over by single word answers, yes, no, good, or even bad. Every member seemed anxious to leave always constantly checking his cell phone or watch. Yet, there was never an end time put on meeting. This reminded me of psychology, when dogs were conditioned to believe it was time to eat when a bell was rung, causing them to salivate even when the food wasn’t being fed to them.  Similarly the members seemed to never want to be at a meeting, yet they want to achieve better goals in the fraternity. This seemed too hypocritical, wanting better, but not wanting to try. Finally, when the meeting was coming to an end the members went into an oblivious state not giving a care in the world of what was going on. The leaders who were in front of the room seemed to only be associating with each other, which was probably the more progressive action. At the end, the bulls were out again. Fitting fifty plus guys into such a small area was obviously not well thought out. It would seem after the first meeting changes would’ve been made. However, 2-3 years after having the house there has been very little corrections made. Except leaving was always more organized than entering. A Few of the members, mostly leaders would stay behind for a little longer to organize any information gathered or to solve any issues not yet talked about. Before leaving entirely members would go back to the same spot before the meeting to talk about anything else before heading off. While nearly ninety percent left to do exactly what they were doing before, homework, watching movies or television. The few who came from outside the house did exactly that and left, but only until the next meeting.

Peer Review In Class

During class I paired with one other classmate to peer review with. However, she wasn't given much to peer review because I had little to give.

My paper is very opinionated, explaining how unorganized the group meetings are. Also, how the meetings are in attire, attendance, and importance to the group. The meetings generally discuss the past weeks events and the future weeks planned. Without organization no progress is made. Similar to this idea I depict the entire scene of the meeting and give a detailed synopsis. This stance in the paper helps to give me an authors view of the scene, breaking down the entire scene. This way best suits the project.

While reviewing my peer's paper I found for the majority of her unfinished paper there weren't many errors. Especially, with the idea of ponging back and forth from play-by-play to a too detailed paper. However, I did mention to Jenna to be careful further in the paper. She had a tendency to mention a lot of the dogs actions, which was becoming very close to a play-by-play script. Even though the word count would've match, the scene depiction would've been horrible to read.

Due to me not having an actual essay to contribute my peer review was not very effective. However, I do feel Jenna has been given great advice from both me and Mr. Horton. I was also given great advice to base my future paper on. This review session is very effective, consequently I wasn't prepared with a rough draft of my paper as i should've been. Thus, I blame the lack of progress on myself. To solve this problem, i'd recommend giving a grade for the rough draft in class to ensure every student participates in the reviewing. On my part, I should've had a paper for peer reviewing.