modern college: step one

My husband and I filmed on Tuesday and Wednesday night I did some editing. After editing I realized that I needed to film some more footage and cut out a lot of unnecessary dialogue I give, but I tried to get up a first version. It's still a little long too, but a lot of it is because I put a blooper reel at the end. Please watch and give me feedback. I want this to be a good video and I need responses to help me do that.

Loving Love's Labor's Lost

I went to see Love's Labor's Lost at Brigham Young University. BYU always has brilliant productions. They put many hours into research and execution. The whole theater was a step into the 1940's. It incorporated the audience and really seemed to integrate everything together pretty well.

I found the acting to be pretty fantastic. Each character knew his/her Shakespearean role and had obviously studied it, but was well grounded in his/her 1940's counterpart role. A couple of characters had distinct accents that really brought new dimension to the role and were intriguing to watch. Don Armado's modified character seemed to be an effective lynch pin between both worlds. He provided a good 1940's persona integrating Shakespearean dialogue. I was also a fan of Biron, I felt like he was entertaining to watch and he also brought good Shakespeare to the 1940's theme. He wasn't dry when he spoke. There was life and color. I can only say that about only a couple of the characters, because most of them seemed to  become too dry and irritable to listen to. It's hard to create engaging Shakespeare because it is so easy to lose the momentum and movement behind it. This production did a very good job of keeping the pace and engaging the audience within it.

When I saw the production I kept thinking could I use this in my own project. It doesn't really tie into my paper since I looked at The Taming of the Shrew exclusively, but I definitely could have used this production of Love's Labor's Lost to talk about the influence that Shakespeare gives women. The women in this play had large roles. I was pleasantly surprised to see them taking up the stage, even when the characters are actually men, because they worked pretty well within the play. They played a trick on the men when the men sought to trick the women. It wasn't one-sided, but the women were very influential in the storyline. In the end when they said they wouldn't marry the men until the war was over, the men were so smitten with the women that they would have agreed to anything. The whole play was about the power that women held over men...now that I think about it, this play would have worked really well with my thesis.

Targeting

So for my "Market Study" I could use a bit of help. I am going to post a prototype of my project too, I just plan on making it kind of tech heavy and that will take a while. So what I think I will do is post it in sections. So I'll post maybe the bare-bones video feed, then I'll post a prototype with the added effects and then I'll post a final video. That way everyone can see the process I took to create my video.

BUT like I said I need a little help with the study. I know I want to target students and through the students their parents. I also need to establish credibility so I think that having students find my video on this blog will do that. The students will be able to say a college student produced a video about a new way to start and help validate research papers. That way their is credibility, I will be using technology as my medium and I will show how I, and maybe someone else (if someone else would like to volunteer) used blogs and the internet to write my research paper.

I want to target:

Texas Students: I will send the link to my siblings and then get my siblings to forward the link to their friends. I will ask the students to consider showing the video to their parent to see if they find it credible.

Utah Students: I have cousins in the area too, I will try and get a different viewpoint from students and parents in Utah.

I want to branch out further. I've looked at a couple of education websites and maybe I should post it to Youtube.com/edu. They have a ton of videos for students.

Rosaline Squared

(Love's Labor's Lost Acts I-III)

I played Rosaline in BYU's production of Romeo and Juliet in 2010 and that has put a special spot in my heart for Shakespeare's characters named Rosaline. I did a lot of research for Romeo and Juliet's Rosaline and there were a lot of references to Rosaline from Love's Labor's Lost. It was thought that Shakespeare had a special place in his heart for Rosaline because she does show up in his later play. 

Rosaline is a secondary to Princess in LLL and Juliet in R&J. The Rosaline from LLL is supposed to be the 'dark lady' of Shakespeare's sonnets who is speculated to be Shakespeare's mistress. In Romeo and Juliet she is this unattainable beauty, weakly praised, but dearly sought after. She isn't seen but only referred to. So I feel like they link up. If they are indeed representations of his mistress then it makes sense that she is seen as unattainable but desirous. In LLL there are complications because the scholars aren't supposed to be wooing. So the act of wooing Rosaline is wrongful because Berowne has made his promise to stay away from women. So she is like a mistress just in the aspect that he shouldn't be with women. I feel like the suspicion fits well within both contexts. I haven't read the poems about the 'dark lady' but I feel like they all fit in together. 

Love's Labor's Lost has many levels beneath the actual plotline which I like and hope to be able to explore into.

Re-purposed Paper

So my husband and I have been watching HGTV recently and so I decided to call this 2nd stage of my research paper, my re-purposed project. I wanted to actually produce a video of what I want to do, but unfortunately that will have to wait for next week. I will give a very detailed explanation of what I am thinking about doing right now.

I am addressing the taming of the net. I want to appeal first to students and then their parents. I want to address students whose parents have said things like, "blogs are never helpful for papers" and "get off the internet, you will never get your hw done". So I've decided that I want to create a reality tv show. I won't make it full length, but a 5 minute show. I will create credibility by establishing myself as a BYU student and I want to go over the steps that I used to create my own paper and show both students and parents how to effectively use the most of the internet to write a good paper. I still don't want to lose the Taming of the Shrew element and I haven't figured out how to put that in.

I will make it very creative with effects and staging. I hope to make it entertaining enough to watch and still credible. I've seen it done pretty well before, and so I just hope I can get close to that.

Vlo-Arg!

Alright, the title is a composite of vlog and argument. I found this funny as I am very tired. It took me forever to make this video. I had no idea that it would be so hard to condense my argument into a short video. I want to take less than two minutes, but at three and a half I couldn't figure out what else to leave out. I know that I want to do this again because I can see where I have room to improve, but it was a fun first effort.

Here you go: 

Kayla...This is 4 You

So I started just responding to your blog, but then I realized that I could just as efficiently write a new blog post about your project on my blog and you can take it or leave it.

First, I feel like 'abuse' in general is a big topic and although you limited your paper to Nicarthy's signs of abuse maybe if you focus on a specific type of abuse or a group that gets abused than that might make the forum more accessible. It might make it easier for certain abuse victims to feel secure in the information they are getting because it applies more specifically to them. On the other hand leaving it more open makes it easier to reach a huge group of people. So I guess it really depends on just how much detail you want to get into and where you want to go with this.

Second, I am still unclear about whether you want to just show examples of abuse to have people identify with or you are trying to help abuse victims by allowing them to first identify their problem and then giving them a literary 'solution'. Either way could work as long as it is clear that you are simply giving literary examples not real world examples, because that could be confusing.

Now after those are looked at you can decide the format for the project. I like your forum idea. It is a non-evasive way to have people identify a problem without actually having to explain it to someone in detail. It is an extremely popular form for surface 'diagnosing' both medical and psychological issues. So I think it has good potential. Another option more along the lines of what we were discussing in class is a short film clip or youtube video. I think that would be a good medium for your project, if you don't mind being on camera. You could pretend to be a psychologist and help abuse victims by giving a brief description of abuse suffered by a Shakespeare character and then maybe a real world solution. You could do a couple of these and maybe in the corner there is a "these are fictional situations" so that people who see this are aware. Then after your clip a screen that says contact Women's Abuse Hotline, if there is actually such a thing, or the Battered Women's Shelter or something. Or you could pretend to do a radio show where people 'call' in and you answer their questions with literary examples... Both of these ideas may be dumb, but they sound like a  lot of fun to me.

So here is a list of characters to look at as abuse victims and maybe abusers:
--Desdemona Abuse in Othello
--Twelfth Night's "Notorious Abuse" of Malvolio: Shame, Humorality, and Early Modern Spectatorship (if you've seen the loose adaptation, "She's the Man" the spider is named Malvolio and is the victim of abuse by everyone except the weird guy.)
--Kate, The Taming of the Shrew. While we differ significantly on opinions about the play as a whole, I do think the reason Kate is a shrew is because of abuse. Her father clearly dotes on Bianca more and the favoritism might have lead Kate to act out inappropriately.
--Ariel, The Tempest. (Maybe, I'd have to look this one over again to be sure that if would be categorized by your definition.)
--Antonio and Shylock, The Merchant of Venice. DUH :)
--Portia, The Merchant of Venice.
--Don Juan, Much Ado About Nothing.
--Lady Macbeth/Macbeth, Macbeth.
--3 daughters of King Lear (Goneril, Regan, Cordelia), King Lear. There is definitely abuse going on in this relationship
Romeo and Juliet against the Capulets and Montegues, Romeo and Juliet. (Nurse was a master manipulator in this play if I thinking of it correctly)
Ophelia in Hamlet, Hamlet. (eh maybe this doesn't work because it wasn't like anyone tried to abuse her purposefully...unless you say Hamlet with his mysterious 'wooing')


If I think of someone else, I will let you know.

A Cate Kate

A Cated Kate

I had my interview with Professor Burton on Friday and I must admit it is nerve-wracking to sit there and know that he is grading your paper right in front of you. (Although it is never as bad as I think it will be.)

Here is a slice of what we chatted about. The social aspect of the paper. I thought that it was beneficial because my peers really helped me get excited about my paper. I was able to bounce my paper ideas with a friend who has his masters in English and is getting his PHD. It really helped me solidify what I wanted my paper to be about. I didn't like trying to find a connection through blogs and other sights. I looked around for hours and ended up just getting more frustrated with the fruitless efforts.

We also talked about the response my paper had with my husband. I actually went home and asked my husband specifically how he thought my paper applied our relationship. He said that he is definitely like Petruchio trying to tame me for my benefit. I am a little too stubborn and I have a really specific way I like things done so I can see where he is coming from...lol Anyway it was nice to know that my husband, who is not into reading or english at all found something beneficial out of my paper.

Doctor Burton and I also talked about the next step in the class and how I can put my paper into a new medium and a new avenue. We discussed looking at my paper in terms of new media and the digital age. How my paper about the benefit of taming or making use of new technology will be able to help students for the future. We can show them the appropriate way to use the internet. I think this idea is really great and if anyone has any ideas on it I'd really like to talk with them. The other idea I had was a forum for marriage counseling between couples with one really dominant spouse. I could make a series of "How to..." blogs on working out that kind of relationship or stage a counseling session or make a forum. It could prove interesting.

Anyway I look forward to exploring all the new avenues open for me at this point.