Nicholas Manton - English Project

Self-Reflection

            Recently, in Sexuality and Society, we read the interesting tale of The Scarlet Letter, about the complicated relationships of Hester Prynne during colonial times. Shortly after reading The Scarlet Letter, we watched Juno, about the struggles that a girl named Juno has with being pregnant. Our project is loosely based upon both of these stories, mainly the themes we pulled from them. Matt and I chose to base ours off of theme of the main character finding it hard to change, while the world is rapidly changing around them.

            For our project, we wanted to create something that could show our theme very well, and what came to mind was making a stop motion film. Making a stop motion film showed one person (me) staying the same throughout the entirety of the video, while everything else around me, was changing very fast. The process of making the film was rather tedious, but in the end it was worth it.

We didn’t want the film to be the only aspect of our project, so we spent a good amount of time searching for songs that would relate to our topic. At first, we were thinking about using the song at the end of Juno, but that would be too closely related to the movie, so that song was scratched from the list. But, after much more searching we came upon song via Pandora, called Tire Swing by Kimya Dawson. We believe this song was just what we were looking for, the lyrics strongly related to our theme, and the beat was similar to the one at the end of Juno.

Putting the project together on the computer went without toil. But, taking the pictures was extremely tedious, getting the angle correct, working around the city folk, etc. When we had to take the pictures in the night time, the camera acted as if it hadn’t had sleep, and kept capturing blurry pictures, which prolonged our night, but was not a major setback.

With the minor setbacks that we had, I believe we crafted a well put together project, showing our understanding of our theme, as well as making an interesting visual. The project should show via the pictures, how much time we put into this project. The only part I wish we could have done was rather than choosing a song off the Internet to play in the background of our video, was Matt and I each playing a guitar in the background, like the ending of Juno. I believe that would’ve been much more personal, and much more powerful for our project. We couldn’t complete that aspect due to the fact that I have never played a guitar before, and we did not have enough time for me to learn it. And, if we could do it again, I would’ve taken the time from the start of the project to learn at least how to play the chords on the guitar so that we could have added that in, but that’s about it.