Final Class Reflection

This class started out by me needing an English credit so I picked something that sounded easy, but it turned out that it has taught me a lot more real-life skills than many of my other, core classes have, and was actually pretty interesting. 

The assignments that we got in here all had a point to them, and by doing these assignments and discussing them in class we learned valuable writing skills that we may need in the future for our job, applications, etc. Beyond that, we also did the whole project with the deployment strategy, campaign, and grant proposal, which was a great first step in experiencing the process of creating and deploying a groups ideas in hopes to better change the world. The grant proposal was also pretty difficult to make because there are so many factors involved. It wasn't just a typical essay, and that made it much harder. 

The discussions we had were also really interesting. We talked a lot about society's dependence on media and technology, and how it shapes our lives and causes us to think in different ways. The discussions were pretty heavy though, in the sense that the questions weren't simple if you really wanted to give a good, honest answer. It was also really cool to listen to what other people in class think or believe because everyone thinks differently. Some people have completely opposite opinions and it's interesting to hear what they have to say. This was a big part of our campaign groups because we all had to compromise when we had different opinions on things.

Overall I liked the class. If I have room in my schedule I may consider taking another English course at some point. 

Campaign Video

Here's the link to our video that we used for our campaign.

The goal with our video was to create something positive and lighthearted that showed that UF students are more than what they're stereotype defines them as. We asked people to tell us their year, their major, and then anything about themselves that's not racially or gender oriented. We got a lot of results, and it was really cool because all these students walking around UF, who we don't know at all, all have interesting things to share about themselves. Just creating the video was really inspirational for us because it just reinforced the strength of our campaign - almost everyone we talked to had nothing stereotypical to say about themselves, which was great. Hopefully this would be similarly inspirational to those watching the video.

However, creating the video wasn't easy. For starters, none of us were really film experts. I volunteered to make the movie because I had made one before using Windows Movie Maker (which is horrible) and figured I had some decent experience. It helped when it came to editing the movie, but some things still didn't come out right (the sound would be choppy when I tried to change the volume).

Beyond that, actually getting people was pretty difficult. The first video we made was actually our favorite - we had so many cool interviews, but the production values of it were poor. It had that phone-look to it and you could hardly hear anyone. We remade the movie, and although the results were still good, it wasn't as good as the first one. We figured this had to do with differences in when we shot the movie. The first one was shot during a busy, mid-week early-afternoon. The second one was shot during a quieter, Friday late-afternoon on exam weeks.

It was a great learning experience though. What started as a simple idea of, "Hey let's make a movie!" while we were in class turned out to be a bit more complicated and harder than we expected.

Campaign Social Media

Here are the links to our Twitter and Instagram for our campaign.

Our Twitter was created with the idea that we want to post about stereotypes around campus and in the world, but also give that feeling of a unification with school pride. This is to make it appeal more to UF students, which was our target audience, because we definitely all feel more at home in a club when it advertises itself as unifying us all as Florida Gators.

Our Instagram was created with a similar idea, however the emphasis on Gator Pride is lessened. The hashtag, profile pictures, and main goal remains the same - however, the Instagram is more focused on stereotypes. This is largely because of the way Instagram's layout is. Twitter allows us to modify colors and add a cover photo, which means we can make it have more of a Gator feel. Instagram, however, doesn't, and so we stuck with our Instagram being very heavy on stereotypes. We actually preferred this too. Although we are Gators, we don't need to be bombarded with pride, and the disparity between the Twitter and Instagram is nice because each site serves its own purpose.

Our goal with the social media itself was to have an easy way to spread our campaign and reach many UF students at once. Social media is very essential to the younger population of today's world, and as a result the best way to communicate with this population is by utilizing this social media. If we were to focus our campaign into a physical process rather than virtual, we probably would get less supporters.

Campaign Topic

My campaign group chose to do our project on stereotypes. It was pretty funny how this came about. When we were first assigned our groups we sat down and looked at each other and realized that our group was very diverse in itself, and then we proposed the idea of talking about stereotypes. It felt like we had to do stereotypes because of how our group was composed of minorities, but it was also something we all felt passionate about since we had all felt the effects of stereotypes before. 

There was really no argument after that, we all agreed that stereotypes was a good topic. We wanted to focus on racial stereotypes, and we actually ended up gearing our campaign towards that, however gender stereotypes can be seen too, just with less emphasis. The reason for this is that talking about multiples forms of stereotypes would cause our campaign to be too broad. Having a narrow focus would allow it to be much more powerful and reach a more dedicated audience. If we were broadly focused, some of our audience may only be interested in one form of stereotype and some in another, which would cause a split and it would be hard to unify everyone. 

Making a campaign about stereotypes was easy in the sense that stereotypes are everywhere and it's easy to talk about them. However, it was hard because the content had to be very specific. For example, what we decide to post on social media can't offend anyone, and there has been discussions on whether certain posts were too harsh or not. Our video also had to show diversity - we had to include all the races and genders and make sure that no single race was dominating. Stereotypes in general is a very sensitive topic, and to create an effective campaign about it you have to be very careful of what you post because the audience is going to be very critical if even the slightest thing seems off. 

Deployment Strategies

The deployment strategies project that we had to do really got me thinking about how much work is required to deploy rhetoric and incite some sort of movement. On the surface you would think, "Yeah, just hang up some posters here and there and you're done." But there's so much more than just that.

It starts with the actual piece of visual rhetoric. You have to tailor it to your target audience, which means that your first attempt at creating the rhetoric may not be the best one. As a younger person, I would naturally create rhetoric that would appeal to a younger audience, however if I wanted to appeal to an older audience I'd have to put a lot more thought into it - the colors, the layout, the size of the text, everything has to fit the target audience.

Then there's the actual message of the image. A lot of times someone supports a good cause, and then they create an image that represents their cause well, but the real question is, does that image actually inspire others to act? It takes some sort of interesting edge - sarcasm, humor, bitterness - to actually get a message across that will cause people to think about what they saw/read and act upon it. This can be a bit difficult because the type of tone that you decide to use has to fit your topic and purpose. You can't just talk about things like abortion using a humorous tone.

I would have to say pulling numbers and statistics and deciding where to put the rhetoric was the hardest part of the deployment strategy for me. For example, it may seem that putting up your rhetoric in a certain area is a good idea, but knowing exactly how many people and what type of people walk by that area is very important, and also very hard data to find. A spot may have high traffic but if only old people walk by when you're trying to communicate to a younger population then that spot turns out to be very bad. Likewise, if a spot has only younger people walking by it, but very low traffic, it may also be a bad spot too. 

Blood of the Condor

Blood of the Condor was a very interesting movie, particularly because of the way it was filmed. For me personally, I found the movie to be very boring. It was slow-paced, lacked color or much English, and didn't feel very eventful or climactic. It was just a slow ride through these natives lives and situation with the peace corps, shown in a very dull manner. However, "boring-ness" is personal and doesn't mean that the movie is bad.

For what it was trying to accomplish, and for the way it portrayed the information to a population of natives who had never really watched films, it did a fantastic job. This goes back into why the movie was interesting - the way it was filmed, especially with its low budget, appealed to an audience of natives and got them to revolt, but I would have to bet that if you put this movie in theaters today, many people would get bored.

I would have to say that my favorite thing about the movie was the way it portrayed the magical leaves. I'm not sure how much of it was a true story or not, but by showing the leaf ritual and then showing in the movie that the leaves were right was an extremely effective way of relating to the natives. The director likely had no faith in any of the natives beliefs, but he showed in the movie how the natives beliefs were powerful and correct, and this probably incited a lot of positive response from the natives.