My project was to build a community through a super smash bros tournament. I did this by making a tournament and getting a bunch of different people to come, then recording the whole thing and making it into a documentary style video. When I started this project, I along with many SLA kids had very unrealistic expectations for my capstone. I wanted to do the biggest and grandest things for this project but I quickly realized that I couldn’t do all the things I had planned for this project. So as push came to shove there was a lot of stuff that I wanted to do that I wasn’t able to do. Things like starting a social media campaign or livestreaming the event. Even with the things I took out I still had the workload of 2 capstones. I had to start off by making all the rules for the game and finding out all the logistics that were going into this tournament. Number of players, Number of Switches, Camera equipment, and stage lighting were all things I had to do. I then made sure that the event was going to run smoothly by getting people to go and assist me. I think the coolest thing I had to do was figuring out how to work the mics in the auditorium. After the actual event happened I still had to go through the hours of footage I got and piece together a documentary.

Annotated Bibliography: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ONhay95DaCCDXsGl_-UjgVn44K6jSFeLj70bWEO6uiQ/edit?usp=sharing

Video: https://youtu.be/QigJFIm-12s

The current poster for the movie Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock is very much of its time. It looks like a romcom poster, not one for a horror movie. That’s why I decided to redraw a poster of it in my own vision. As for the name of the film I have less of a problem with it but I do think it has a different meaning nowadays. Also the way that Hitchcock marketed this movie was weird, the trailer by itself is absolutely bizarre and would never be done now.

To start off we would change the name from Psycho to Broken. The film is all about tension and not knowing what’s going to happen next so when the title is Psycho that kind of gives away the mystery of it from the start. I also think that the movie plays Norman Bates off as a sympathetic character so this title further shows Norman and as a sympathetic character.

For the movie poster I realized that the original poster was very basic and didn’t offer much. It was also of its time and just wasn’t very eye-catching, it also didn’t have a centerpiece or a focus point. In my rendition of it I decided to have the focus point be on the Bates as a shadow figure of mother holds Norman Bates in her hands. I wanted to include the other characters so on the side peeling off of the middle were Marion Crane, Arbogast, Lila Crane and Sam Loomis, and Norman Bates’s taxidermy Owl. I want to give off this effect of importance in this poster for these side characters because even though Lila and Sam solve the mystery, they aren’t featured in the original poster at all. I also think that the owl adds a bit more of a spooky factor to it and is a fun little thing to put on the poster. I also think that having the title at the bottom is cool because it makes them feel like they are barely being held up.

When it comes to advertising this movie I think that I would go with a different approach then Alfred Hitchcock. First the trailer would be clips from the movie not him walking around the set. It would start off by hyping up how much money was on the line. Then we would go into a mad search with a bunch of characters questioning one another all leading to Marion’s scream at the end of the trailer.

Research (Daniel) New Historical Lens: “HIV/AIDS: Snapshots of an Epidemic.” AmfAR, https://www.amfar.org/thirty-years-of-hiv/aids-snapshots-of-an-epidemic/.

HIV and Aids are a lesser spoken issue in modern day society, although treatment and knowledge of these diseases are more profound than what it was compared to the early 1970s (when the Immortalists takes place) it is still a rather touchy subject since so little is concrete to this day. What is solidified is that it is commonly transmitted through sex and often disproportionately affects gay men, “gay men, represent only 2%–7% of the U.S. population, 70% of all new HIV infections in 2019 were in this group,” and “Initial use of the term gay-related immune deficiency (GRID) or “gay cancer” by the media and others mistakenly suggests an inherent link between homosexuality and the new disease,” In reference to this, Chloe Benjamin uses this within her book, as Simon encaptures everything there is within these ideas. He dies the quickest, and is among the 4 other candidates, much more selfish and seemingly has sex as a bad habit.

Karston Singleton:

WCBS 880, director. Author Talks: Chloe Benjamin Discusses “The Immortalists”. 2018. Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etzIy2P1MK8.

This Video explained a lot in terms of who Chloe Benjamin is. It helped us understand her choices. An interesting facet of her writing is the fact that no one in the story is really a “villain.” Everyone makes bad decisions- even our protagonists. Knowing that she’s very empathetic explains this part of her writing. She doesn’t demonize any of her characters as she tries to understand where they are coming from. This is a choice-driven story more than anything else. Her growing up with a set of gay parents also explains the level of care she puts into Simon’s section. My groupmates and I all agree that that section is arguably the best and most fleshed out.

Yohanna Heyer 1) Lens: New historicism 2) The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin 3) Anthony, Andrew. “’We Were so Scared’: Four People Who Faced the Horror of AIDS in the 80s.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 31 Jan. 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/31/we-were-so-scared-four-people-who-faced-the-horror-of-aids-in-the-80s (Links to an external site.) . 4) This article was about the fear in US society induced by the AIDS epidemic. Prior to reading this article, I had already known that AIDS ran rampant in the gay community because people were not educated on the need to use condoms to protect infections. I knew that because society was so homophobic, this only made it worse. Now people were afraid of gay people and felt as if they were being punished. I did not know that at the beginning of the epidemic in the US people believed that Haitians were more likely to have AIDS, which probably would have furthered the ill treatment that Robert received as being a Black gay man and fueled the disconnect between Simon and Robert. Reading this text gave further insight as to how Simon spent his last days and how his family thought about him once he passed.