Scarlet Letter/Juno Reflection

Posted by Allison Patterson in Sexuality and Society in Literature - Dunn on

For this project I worked with Alysha. We created a trailer to an episode of True Life in which we followed a day in the life of Alysha. In this video Alysha is revealing her true self by wearing a t-shirt which has all of her personal history written on it. To begin, we chose not to tell any of the students used in the video what the project was. That we received honest reactions, not fabricated rehearsed ones. When we did the interviews with students Alysha and I told the them what the project was and that we were looking for honest comments on how they felt about t-shirt. We never imagined that the students would say such harsh things however, it only emphasized our purpose which was to examine how harsh the high school environment can be and how to show how a high school student feels pressured to his their true self as a result.

    At the beginning of this project Alysha and I set forward clear goals. We planned on having the shirt done by Tuesday, video done by Thursday, and process paper done by Friday. For the most part we stuck to these goals. One of the hardest parts of the project was coming up with a plan as to how we would like to execute the video. From the start of the project we wanted to focus on the theme of public and private self. I really enjoyed Brett Chapman’s project from two years ago so, I used that as inspiration for creating the shirt for our video. We started the project with the idea that we would have Alysha walk the halls in the shirt and we would record the reactions of people around her. As we began recording it became apparent that we needed the input of Alysha’s viewers in order to get our point across. We ended up recording over 20 minutes of video only to use about 4 minutes. We over recorded so that we could decide later on how our video would flow. When Alysha and I sat down to edit the video we immediately thought of the television show True Life because in that show high school students with issues are profiled and their peers give their perspective of the situation. We used that as a basis for our project. From there the rest the project just fell into place. I believe the hardest part was editing the video because lacking imovie meant that Alysha and I spent hours in search of a  suitable alternative.
    I’m really proud of how polished the video turned out however, I wish we could have made it longer. I think that our purpose was understood but it was such a fun project that making it longer would have been even more fun. If I could do this project over I would have taken time on creating the shirt. The shirt fulfilled it’s purpose but if you look closely some of the words are spelled wrong and it just doesn’t look as polished as it should. Alysha and I had a lot of trouble finding a shirt so, we kind of had to settle. In some ways, I think that the dirtiness and rushed look suits our video’s purpose because the video is meant to focus on the dirty truth. We never tried to clean up the video. We allowed the actors to curse and to say offensive things because we wanted the rawest and least sugar-coated emotions. I think the shirt was a symbol of this rawness.  
    In the end, I am happy with our final product. I believe our video shows a significant amount of effort, time, and thought. I am happy with the level of polish our video has while still allowing for rawness. I believe that Alysha and I effectively conveyed the themes public vs. private self and acceptance in our video.

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