Project Proposal Blog #2

In my first blog I mentioned the idea of wanting to conduct interviews with people of diverse backgrounds and report on the findings. After our class on Tuesday, I know that I would really like to follow through on this project.

I am a reader. I always have been and assume I always will be. I love stories, especially memoirs. There is something special about knowing that a story I am about to sit down and read is true. This even connects to movies. When I sit down to watch a movie and if before it starts, the opening credits inform- Based on True Events- I instantly know that I am going to like the movie better than if it were a fictionalized story. People have amazing stories to tell. Just listening to my classmates in class on Tuesday, I felt great emotion to their very honest and personal accounts. I think it is important to hear from people, people who come from different places in the world, who have different experiences, and who may view themselves or their lives as unique or even as simplistic. There are stories to be told. Stories that will teach wonderful lessons. Stories that celebrate. Stories that inspire. I would like to find and to share some of the stories that are out there.

For my project I would interview perhaps 5-6 people who fit the above description. I would create interview questions that range from: How do you feel you are viewed by others in society? to How do you celebrate your ethnicity? The questions I would create would open a dialogue for the purpose of the project: Is how we view ourselves different from how others/society view us and what impact has that had on us? I would figure out how to put my interviews together in a "documentary " fashion. I have an iPad that I can use to record the interviews, and iMovie on my computer, but am very unclear how to go from one to the other as I am not very hands on tech wise, but I will figure it out. I would like to really focus on common themes that the interviews showed (if there are any) and create some type of narrative about those findings. I also feel that I would need to create a release as the interviews would end up on our class website??? The point of my interviews, the focus, is to celebrate race and ethnicity, but also to look for commonalities that our society has imposed upon people.