The 26th amendment - StudentCam Benchmark

Created by:
Ali Ahmed
William Marsh
Tim Mamrol

My group chose this topic because it was the most relevant topic we found. As young men, the voting age is massively significant to us, especially because we will all be 18 by the next presidential election. I liked the freedom we were given in completing this project, and I also especially like working in video and digital media. I found the most difficult aspect of this project to be finding people to interview. My parents (Earl Marsh and B Hibbs) agreed to be interviewed eagerly, but Ali and I spent at least two hours asking people to answer a few questions and found all of three people that were willing to speak to us, out of dozens. I was fascinated and horrified by the Kent State shootings in response to student protest of the Vietnam war and the draft. As someone who will be going to college this fall, while not of the same era as this horrible event, it was startling to think that someone of my age had been killed by his own country for protests. 

I think that the project would have been better if we got more interviews and better stock footage to use for voice overs. I was a bit disappointed by how bland some of the images we had to use for our voice overs. I ran into issues with this project with organizing group mates and formatting the video. When changing the format of the video into flv (the preferred format), the audio consistently cut out in the same spot in three different sets of encoded video. I changed the settings around to the same settings used for the full time digital video class, but the audio still cut out. I think that our script and the interviews were done very well. If this project were to be repeated, I would try to distribute the work more evenly. I feel that I did a large amount of the work, with a decent amount of help from one of my group mates, while the other was largely uninvolved. I learned that the voting age had not always been 18, but perhaps more importantly I learned how valuable a draft can be. While I do not want to be drafted, or have the draft reinstated, the draft can be held responsible for a huge change in the politics of the nation. By forcibly taking mother's sons away from her, to be sent halfway across the world to fight in a brutal, controversial war, the draft really made people in the U.S care about the politics of the nation and the world. While I don't like the idea of the draft, I must say it is an incredible source of motivation for the youth of America, something that is seldom seen in the voting environment.