...Journal Entry of Frustration...

Project updates are supposed to be fun. I'm suppose to write about our progress and how things are coming together. I'm sure that the four of us all have the basic shapes of our movie pieces put together. We have things scripted. We have written. And so it has happened, as it has happened so many times before for me, that we have hit quite a large snag.

My hard drive has started to crap out on me.

We have almost all of our footage captured, and we were going to put together large chunks of our movie tonight. However, it seems that this will not be happening. This evening, I'm going to have to figure out a way to recover our footage so that we don't fall too far behind.

I really wish that technology would actually give you a warning before it screws up.

Where is the "Danger Will Robinson! Danger!" of our youth?

In other news:
I will be working on some sequence editing once we are able to access the footage. I may also try to help Sean out with recording his voice-over parts. The idea is that we are going to put together his sequences first, so he can get a feeling for the flow of the scene and thus will know how quickly or slowly to speak.

I want to get the bookends finished by Tuesday night.

I need to do some talking head stuff either on Monday or Tuesday. We will have to see which one is the most open.

I'm kind of frustrated right now and not completely satisfied with my footage, or with technology. As such, I'm lacking any sort of proper transitions from topic to topic.

The film we watched this week, Me Boss, You Sneaker, was an anarchic comedy which lampooned asylum seekers, immigrants, and those living in the country to which these people have come. We had a very good discussion about this film and the readings in the class. More people than usual spoke up, and I was really happy about that. We discussed the idea of the "melting pot" and assimilation, diversity of specific countries and/or cities, and characterization was a key component of discussion. Where people playing the roles or were people actually becoming the characters? This particular concept was best shown in the change of the kid in the movie and the way in which he changed his own identity and self-identified as the son of the non-parent Dudie, even as they were about to be deported.

For me, this raises a whole series of questions regarding identity, how people self-identify, and how people would identify other people. I read somewhere that only 2% of people in the States self-identify as vegetarian, and only about 5% of those self-identify as vegan. Of that 2% that self-identify as vegetarian, I would probably say that there is a sizable chunk of that percentage who some people would not at all consider vegetarian because they eat fish/seafood, or chicken when that's the only option available to them.

I actually had these thoughts in class...I dunno why. I'm probably crazy.