Progress at West Adams

Our first challenge in visiting West Adams was conveying the goals of the project to the students of the class. On our last visit to the classroom before spring break, we passed out flip cameras to students and asked them to film things in their lives when they went home. Because we’d been discussing their interests in music, we told them that they might want to record themselves in places where they listen to music, but that they could film whatever they were inspired to record. When we came back to the class last week, there was a total of about a minute of footage. We had to adapt our strategy to be much more specific. Last week, we discussed individual topics – college, music, health/sports – and then picked specific students who were outspoken about one of the topics and gave them the flip cams. We’re hoping that by giving them some direction, they will be able to find something or someone to record.

Another issue we had was in coming up with an overall plan for our documentary. We knew that the students wanted to involve music, but our idea of recording a music video did not in itself provide insight into the lives of the students. Our solution was to have the students write lyrics to the music video based on their interests. Because they repeatedly talked about sports, college and music as inspirations in their lives, these subjects would be the topics of each verse. Our goal is to observe the ways in which they think about these topics, and see how their lives influence the writing of the song. The end of the documentary will be a performance of the song. We’re in the early filming stages, but when we have more footage, we hope that we will have a better idea of how successful this type of project will be.

Overall we’re excited to have started filming and to have a direction that our project is headed in. I hope that we we’re back on Wednesday, the students will have recorded some footage at home. We’ve had four visits so far and I think the class as a whole is starting to get used to our presence. I’ve taken on the approach of asking specific students questions in order to make sure they know I’m interested in what they have to say.