I will win this!

I wanted to have a teaser trailer for my research paper: I did it with Kayla,a girl in my class, because we took the opposite view. I think it really strengthens both of our papers because people can see both sides and are more intrigued at the proof for each. Well without further ado: My 90 second video

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: