Why are we attracted to characters and stories?
Working on LEAP 5 this past week was definitely a unique experience for me. I have done countless group projects prior to this class, but I have never done one for an asynchronous course. It was honestly a bit nerve racking at first, having to reach out and find a partner on my own through email, but thankfully the first person I had reached out to (Olivia) was interested in the same topic I was. We decided to go with the focus of exploring why people are so attracted to characters and stories.
We each picked a film to individually analyze against some of the questions posed within the textbook chapter, and used our video as a method of comparing and contrasting. We presented how we are attracted to characters no matter the genre, and how it was due to the six concepts we used to analyze that we have this attraction.
Film analysis is one of my favorite things to do. So I was very excited to work on this project and I had a whole list of films in mind that I wanted to analyze. But I eventually settled on Brokeback Mountain because I remember watching it in my FLM101 course and I had such a visceral response to it. I was curious to see if I could use the ideas that we had learned in this course to understand the effect that the film had on me when I had first watched it. I feel like through this project, I have an even deeper understanding of the film than I did prior which is very interesting.
In terms of the process of creating this project, I would say that Olivia and I had good communication which allowed us to maximize our efficiency. We set rough deadlines as to when steps should be completed, we designated roles between ourselves in terms of who would do what portion of the project, and we kept in touch throughout every step.
I also felt a bit intimidated by the broadness of this assignment. There really weren’t too many requirements and instructions in terms of the actual content within our videos, which I felt like was both a blessing and a curse in a way. Yes, we had the range to do whatever we felt would be interesting and compelling; but, on the flip side, we also had endless options. I was worried that I was going to struggle with coming up with ideas. But Olivia and I were both pretty much open to anything and would throw out ideas and suggestions here and there, and we actually were able to come up with our project much quicker than I was anticipating.
Further, the actual creation of the video was slightly confusing at first. Neither Olivia nor I were 100% sure how to go about making the video. We considered a few separate options but ultimately decided on creating a video montage with a voiceover. Thankfully, I took a class in the Fall that had us make video essays so I had some practice with this sort of format. So once we had decided on what we wanted to do, it was not anything worth worrying about anymore, besides staying within the time constraints (which we have gone a little bit over, unfortunately).
Lastly, I would have to say that the process of actually uploading the finished product to YouTube was the most stressful part of this entire project. It took about 3 hours and I was worried that the quality of the video would be altered through the uploading process. But luckily, everything worked out alright and the quality did not seem to have changed too much.
