Just imagine, Joe Jonas as a teen detective, and the love of his life (Demi Lovato of course) goes missing. Yes, we know, we just might of made your childhood a tad bit better because yes, we made Camp Rock a film noir.

To begin, we will explain why we chose to create a trailer. Our goal was for our viewers to imagine the entire movie as a film noir, and the only way to do that was through a trailer. A scene would only allow our viewers to enjoy a single segment of the movie, prohibiting their imagination to go beyond that one part. What a trailer does, is touch many parts of the film to create a visual story with little to no detail. That not only intrigues viewers to watch the whole thing, but it is also a way to leave the movie up for interpretation because everyone has different viewpoints.

A film noir cannot be described with just one thing. What makes noirs so magnificent is that they are filled with the unexpected, whether that means the storyline, or just the question as to why it rains 365 days out of the year. When making the trailer we made sure to include one aspect that every noir has, and that aspect is no color, just black and white. After changing the color of the film we watched many noir trailers, and found that light music played in the background the entire time. We chose the song we chose for our trailer because of how soothing yet mysterious it was. We also made sure to use a limited amount of dialogue because emotion, reaction, and expressions are important in noirs. Sometimes a reaction can say way more than just a simple “Wow!’. Let’s not forget the love interest too. We get a glimpse of that love between the Detective and Mitchie, but we’re careful not to show too much because we still want some of it to remain a mystery. Unfortunately, we couldn’t add the magic 365 days a year rain. What we did instead, is make the film a bit darker so viewers can at least get the feeling that it was about to rain in every scene. At first, the trailer might seem too dramatic, but what film noir isn’t over dramatized?

In our opinion, our noir trailer is much better and more entertaining than the regular Camp Rock trailer. In the regular trailer, you are given several story lines that you have to follow in just the trailer. It becomes unclear as to what the main character is looking for. In this trailer, you are given one story line, Mitchie is missing, and only one person can find her, Detective Gray. Also, let’s not forgot all the different songs that are played in the original trailer. In our noir trailer there’s only one song that plays in the background the entire time. The goal of a trailer is to leave you wanting more. We add mystery and excitement in our trailer. So many questions are left unanswered and people have to watch it if they want the answers. It’s just as simple as that.

Trailer Link: https://www.wevideo.com/view/933996725

Addy Gonzalez and Hanna Dunakin

A lot of research went into writing this essay. After reading 'The Things They Carry', I wanted to explore the deeper meaning of pain and the way each and every person experiences it. It was hard to find the perfect resources for my essay, but I ended up finding two perfect interviews, and a great image reflecting my words. I spent a long time trying to word my thoughts in a way people would understand, and although it was a challenge, I was able to use suggestion from my peers to write a piece I am proud of. I made sure not just to discuss the single meaning of pain, but the general meaning, so basically every single type of pain, whether it be physical, emotional, mental, etc..

Imagine being surrounded by an entire army, pointing all their guns at you. Unarmed civilians also surround you, fearing their lives, but knowing that they can’t back down because it’s a sign of weakness. One man steps up, knowing that there could be consequences, he decides to make peace between the army and the civilians, so he steps up, and all the guns are pointed at him, not you, yet you still fear. He places flowers in the gun, and no one makes a move or a sound, as if the man was now surrounded by the dead. He shows no signs of stopping, and as his bouquet of flowers becomes one single flower, you realize that it wasn’t fear of death you were feeling, it was fear of tyranny, and this man had just proven to you and everyone else there, the hypocrisy of pain and violence. One might think the previous statement was created to get them thinking of a somewhat realistic situation to better explain the healing of pain. It is anything but fictional, it’s an image of truth. The truth may be dreadful and uncomfortable, but this image expresses the tenderness of pain and its remedy. This is an image of life, a life put through violence and war, yet effectively reacts to a situation with the power of silence and influence.

Healing of agony can be conceived through an action, a memory, a statement, an image, or in better terms, it can be formulated in different ways, but as stated by Veena Das, a theoretician and ethnographer, there are two things that all healing has in common. “The notion of healing carried two ideas: the idea of endurance, and the idea of the capacity to establish a particular relationship to death….” One has to be willing to accept the pain they suffer to be able to alleviate the pain. In this way, not only is their acceptance, but realization that the pain will never go away, but awareness that mending pain is much stronger than any kind of pain itself.  “But I was very struck by the ways in which pain does write itself enduringly on people’s lives. It was not about a thunderous voice of pain, but about the manners in which pain was woven into the patterns of life.” You have to be open to all pain, to the consequences, or else healing will never happen, and only pain would ever exist. The thing is though, that without pain, life would be nothing. We would never experience reality, and we’d be selfish because without pain, we would get everything we wanted and thought we deserved. Pain draws a fairly clear line between selfishness and selflessness.

There is a single word that can bring terror and pain to many in an instant, a word so powerful that the meaning is pointless because it is nothing compared to the suffering and suffocation one is already in from just hearing the word. War...the word is war. As clearly stated by author Chris Hedges, “Yes. I think for those who are in combat, it very swiftly can become an addiction. War is its own subculture. It can create a landscape of the grotesque that is, perhaps, unlike anything else created by human beings.” Experiencing war in any way is a very difficult and uncomfortable experience that no one should go through. For soldiers, it’s as though war is a separate world, a separate language, or a separate life. Once in a war, you can never get out, even if the war is officially over. You become so intimate with it, that you can never forget about it. The horror will always be in your dreams, and the pain will always be crawling up your spine, and to your head, where you always remember every dreadful moment. War is something so unique and spectacular, that it is almost a mystery to the human race. We still explore war and it’s many characteristics, that is why war still exists and will never go away. There’s no meaning of war yet because we still don’t understand it, and there will never be one single clear definition. It’s existed for hundreds of years, yet it’s still something new and fresh that is somewhat unknown to our race.

A life with no pain, is a life not lived to the fullest. We suffer and always find a way to blame someone, yet the only one to blame should be ourselves, for not allowing leeway for reflecting on the good. Pain is different for everyone. Some might experience it through violence or war, and others might experience it from love, or hate, or even just life itself. Healing is a reflection of pain, and that is what needs to be understood to be able to live on, not move on, but to live your actual life, the life you grew up living. We must understand the difference between all pain, whether physical, mental, or emotional. As human beings, we have the right to express our pain, our anger, and our fight to healing. As human beings, we have the right to live.

WORK CITED

"Listening to Voices. An Interview with Veena Das." Interview by Kim Turcot DiFruscia. 2010. Web. 15 Mar. 2016. <http://www.alterites.ca/vol7no1/pdf/71_TurcotDiFruscia_Das_2010.pdf>

When I was younger, my father would always read to me, every night, before I would go to bed. He would sit on my bed, and I would lay next to him, with my head on his shoulder, which you might think would be for comfort, but in reality, it was so I could just read along. It wasn’t just the story my dad would read me that made me look forward to this nightly event, it was the way he read. He made me imagine and create a world just like the places in the book. It was never just one book though, and that’s what made this so wonderful. Everything he read was my ticket to escape reality. I soon began to imagine my own worlds. I stopped listening to my dad read, because I would just think about my perfect world. My head would no longer rest on his shoulder, and my eyes no longer rested on the pages of the book. It was those nights of reading that helped me fantasize of a world where everything and anything was like a dream. 

I can’t say I don’t fantasize today, because that would just be a complete utter lie, and an ugly one at most. It’s because of literacy that I allow myself to daydream from time to time. It’s because of literacy that I fear less of reality.  It is something so delicate and specific, that if you don’t practice it, you won’t understand anything. Literacy, words, are used as a way to show physical emotion that you are too scared to show on your own. It took me a while to understand that. I would always hide something, or fear to express how I felt. For that reason, I became a shy child, one who refused to go out into the world and explore. Instead, I’d explore in my books. I came to the realization that in most of the books I read, the characters were just like me. They were able to express their emotion, their feeling, in writing, or more to say, the author was able to express their feeling and emotion in writing. I envied them for being able to do that. Personally, I am unable to write the way I intend to. It’s hard to write down who I am, and easier to write about someone else.

Rumer Godden once said “When you learn to read you will be born again...and you will never be quite so alone again.” Literacy is nothing but a way to represent who you are, and who you want to be. You not only gain knowledge about the world, but you also gain knowledge about who you are. There are some people who read and write because they have to, and there are other people who read and write because they have a strong desire, a craving, that can only be fixed with literacy. Once one learns who they are and who they want to be, there’s no stopping them. Those people are the ones that inspire the next generation writers, the next generation of book worms. Literacy inspires people to do the things they once thought to be unimaginable. Literacy is merely just a way to escape. That is why you are never alone. You read a book to imagine yourself completing those desires, you feel as though you’re invincible.

Hello everyone!

This is my third and final blog post for my You and the World (YATW) project. Just a quick summary, if you haven’t read my previous posts. In my first post I introduced my issue of global poverty. I wanted to focus on a specific topic in my first blog post concerning global poverty which was global hunger and its effects on children and adults today. The UN Millenium goals were introduced, one of the goals being to decrease global hunger and poverty by half by 2015. An organization called Heifer International was also introduced in my first blog. They believe in something called the 12 cornerstones, which they accomplish by giving families in need heifers. In my second post I talked about my trip to Ecuador, and how I helped the families in need there, and what I experienced throughout this trip. In this post I am going to talk about my class presentation, an interview I had with someone who works in the Heifer International Organization, and how you can help.

My experience in Ecuador was one I will never forget. The joy and laughter when kids were given toys. The tears that rushed out of the eyes of the parents as they saw their children so excited and energetic for the first time in a long time. Words cannot describe the things I saw, but I wanted to share what I’ve done, I wanted people to see what I saw and become aware of this issue. I created a slideshow with pictures from my trip, and tried my best to describe each and every one of them to my audience. My goal was to inform people of the world we live in now, and that everyone can do something to make it better. I explained to my audience the purpose of my trip, which was give toys, food, and clothes to the families in need from 6 towns that were high up in the mountains. We drove trucks filled with all the items, and it took the entire day, from 7 A.M. to 5 P.M. to go to each town. My family does this every year around Christmas, and I was lucky enough to join them this year. I wanted everyone to know that while everyone might celebrate Christmas differently, my family and I wanted to give families we visited, a holiday experience that they might not have had before. My presentation goal was to not only inform people of what I did, but to encourage everyone that little things like what I did in Ecuador, can be a huge impact on someone or something else.

Click here for my presentation video, and to see my slideshow, click here.

Here I am giving my YATW

presentation.

Here is another picture of my

YATW presentation.

I became very interested in the Heifer International Organization and wanted to learn a little more about their work. I wrote an email to Donna Kilpatrick, the Livestock Manager of the organization, and asked her a few questions, which she answered with great detail. Currently there are 2.8 billion people who live with an income of less than two dollars per day. Heifer International has helped 20.7 million families, this brings 94.5 million men, women, and children they have helped thus far. Now, if one little organization can help this amount of people, imagine hundreds, even thousands of these organizations, poverty would be decreased greatly. Heifer International also has an educational program where people can visit their farm, and learn about what they do to help decrease poverty, and how they do it. They want to teach people about what it’s like to live in poverty and encourage them to take action. I personally went to their farm three years ago, where I spent three days in their educational program. I was given a tour and was able to experience the lower class lifestyles that so many people live in today. I recommend paying Heifer International a visit because it is an experience like no other. If you’d like to know more about my interview with Donna, please click here.

By now, I hope you’re asking yourself, What can I do? Well, if you are, then that is a great question. There are so many things you can do, such as, start an organization, organize a fundraiser, travel to a poor town and help the them build things that are needed. There are hundreds of things that can be done! There are people who need your help, whether it’s little help, or huge help, because remember, every little step, is one step closer in decreasing poverty. We want to help the UN get to their goal to decrease poverty by half between 1990 and 2015 with people who get an income of less than one dollar per day. Why help? Well approximately 2.6 million children die each year because of hunger-related causes. 2.6 million children who can’t grow up and accomplish their dreams. 2.6 million children who can’t experience the world like you and me. 2.6 million children who can’t laugh and play, and live life to its finest. In 2008, 9 million children died before their fifth birthday because of hunger and malnourishment. We’re losing our next generation because we can’t fill their stomachs. Our next leaders, doctors, scientists, they're dying. Parents are suffering and working hard everyday to provide for their family. Some die because of too much hard work, and some suffer seeing their children suffer. Is that convincing?  

Thank you, for reading, and I would like to thank Donna Kilpatrick for taking a little of her time to allow me to interview her, Ms. Dunn for guiding me through this entire process, and DuBois for taking pictures during my presentation.

Hello Everyone!

If you read my first blog post you know that my You and the World (YATW) project is about global hunger and poverty. I talked about two organizations who have been trying to reduce the number of families in hunger and poverty. They also encourage people from all around the world to join them in their journey. Although both organizations are using different strategies to accomplish their goal, they won’t give up until the amount of global poverty is decreased. If you’d like to learn more about these organizations, please click on the links below.

Heifer International

UN Millenium Goals

After writing my first blog post, I took a short trip to Ecuador. Every Christmas, my family in Ecuador go up to the mountains where there are lots of poor towns. They bring food, toys, and clothes to give to the families. My family believes that it is better to give people in need something they can use efficiently, something they know that will help them, instead of money. The reason for this is because we don’t know what they will do with the money, they could use the money for something they don’t need.

I went with my family for the first time this year, and the experience was like no other. We drove to five different towns. Toys were given out to the children, clothes were given out to adults and children, and this year we gave out candy and crackers to everyone. Some of the towns were big, and some of the towns were small. There were at least a hundred people in two towns, and there were 20-40 people in other towns. The houses were all hand made with stone or mud, and the schools were all just one room. Each town had a church, and the church in each town, was the largest building.

While researching this topic, I thought I knew everything there was to know about this issue, but nobody will ever know everything about anything. I learned so much from my trip and experience. I got to meet people who are struggling with poverty. People who try really hard to keep their families healthy. Mothers who would do anything to see a smile on their child's face. There were lots of kids who weren’t attending school when I was there, instead, they were working or taking care of their siblings.

When we arrived, every child in the town would run up to the car and peek inside. They saw the toys and jumped up and down in excitement. Each and every child waited patiently for their toy, and when they got one, they opened it; their patience getting weaker and weaker. And finally, they were able to open that toy, their expressions after that, are indescribable. I’ve never seen somebody so happy, it was amazing! Some parents cried, and others laughed, others just smiled, because their children were smiling. Candy and clothes were given out as well. We made goodie bags that had crackers and candy. The first thing that was eaten (by almost everyone) when the bag was opened, were the crackers, and the candy was saved for later. We made sure everyone got clothes and shoes. Some people didn’t have warm clothes for those unexpected cold days, or an extra pair of dry clothes for the days that rained. We also gave out shoes that could be worn in any weather, most people wore sandals, or worn out shoes.

I will never completely understand this issue, no matter how much I try to. I don’t know how it feels to be in their situation. As much as want to understand, I can’t, but that doesn’t stop me from helping. Poverty and hunger are global issues, which means people from all around the world should be helping to decrease it. Join an organization, or start your own organization, or even help out at a soup kitchen. Every little thing matters, every little step is one step closer to help decrease poverty. What really leaves me wondering though is, does there have to be a goal? For example the UN has a goal to decrease poverty by half from 1990 to 2015. Will they stop there though, or will they keep on going. Poverty and hunger can’t go away just like that. Awareness of this issue has to be brought to the attention, people have to keep on helping because there will always be something to do.

Not only will I keep on helping, but I will be sure to bring awareness to this issue. I am going to create a presentation for my classmates and explain to them what I’ve been doing these past couple weeks. I’m going to show them what I got to see during my trip, and I’m going to explain what I did, and what they can do to help.

Thank you for reading and stay tuned for my next post!

Fieldwork Photos

Hello!

My name is Hanna Dunakin and I go to Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I am in Ms. Dunn’s English 1 class. Ms. Dunn recently introduced a new project called “You and the World” (YATW). We are supposed to pick an issue in the world that interests us and we believe is important. During the project we also have to find a way to help the issue we chose, and make people aware of it. You can volunteer, donate, create an organization, make a blog, or anything you think could help.

World hunger and Poverty have always been a interest of mine. My mother has always tried to help the people in need by buying them clothes, food, and during Christmas, toys for kids in need.  Although both hunger and poverty are important issues, hunger is part of poverty. I want my project to be about a specific issue, instead of a general issue.

Nearly 870 million people suffer from undernourishment in the world, that’s one in eight! 852 million of those people live in developing countries, which is 15 percent of the population in those countries. 100 million children under the age of five suffers from hunger and underweight. Each year it has been estimated that nearly 10.9 million children die, at least five million of those 10.9 million die because of malnutrition. This is our future generation dieing. Who knows, our next president could of been part of that group. What if person/s who could of found a cure for cancer, or a solution to immensely decrease the rate of world hunger, died in that group? We could do so much more than what we are doing now. Sometimes I even wonder, do people really know how serious and dangerous this issue is?

Hunger is usually described as starving or lack of food for a couple hours and you need a snack. Hunger is not that simple. The definition of chronic hunger, from http://www.worldhunger.org/, is:

Hunger is a term which has three meanings (Oxford English Dictionary 1971)

• the uneasy or painful sensation caused by want of food; craving appetite. Also the exhausted condition caused by want of food

• the want or scarcity of food in a country

• a strong desire or craving

This is a very important issue because it’s not getting the attention it deserves. There are walks, runs, and fundraisers for issues like, childhood cancer (or cancer in general), AIDS, diabetes, etc. but there aren’t any for World Hunger. Although there are organizations that conduct fundraisers to collect canned food and toys for the people in need, it’s not enough. In reality hunger kills more people than AIDS, Malaria, and tuberculosis combined! I’m not saying I don’t care about the people who suffer from these illnesses, because I do. What I’m trying to say is, if hunger is a bigger world issue than three world issues combined, maybe hunger should get at least the same amount of scrutiny.  

The UN (United Nations) has started something called the Millennium Development Goals. It is a series of goals concerning world hunger. For example, obliterate extreme poverty and hunger in the world, decrease child mortality, and many other goals that the UN hopes to accomplish by 2015. Is that enough time to accomplish all the goals they have set, including the goal for poverty and hunger? The goals can be found in the United Nations website. Below there’s an infographic of the UN world hunger and poverty goal:

The UN is bringing awareness to this issue. They set a

goal that they hope to accomplish by 2015.

There is another organization called Heifer International where you can donate money to give a family in need a heifer, goat, or water buffalo. The reason a family gets an animal and not money is because these animals give the families something called the 12 Cornerstones. This is better than money because it gives families immediate help. They wouldn’t have to spend lots of money on their own animals because the animals given to them are donated. If they got money they would buy food and clothes because it would be the only affordable thing for them. With animals they can get nutrition and clothes for no cost. Heifer International works in 36 countries and have helped 20.7 million families so far. Imagine the number of people they have helped.

There need to be more organizations like Heifer International and the UN Millenium Goals if we truly want to bring awareness to this issue. Runs and walks should be organized to raise money for organizations like Heifer. Families need something they can hold on to, something to raise their standard of living during the long term. Money can’t do that which is why the Heifer organization is a great example of what we should be doing. Setting goals always helps people to push harder so that they can accomplish it. That’s why the UN made a goal to fight against hunger and poverty. A man named Rob Rhinehart came up with a simple idea for a solution that could decrease the amount of hunger in the world. Small steps like these turn into huge steps by the end. These are things that the entire world should be doing. 870 million people need our help. Future generations need our help. World hunger needs to be eradicated!

Stay tuned for my next post!

UN Goal

Facts

About Heifer International

Bibliography