Fear. Fear can drive us. Fear can keep us alive. Although we too often forget that fear can control us.
For the latest PLP project we were studying the fear and paranoia instilled by the Cold War. This was one of my favourite PLP projects to date because of how much freedom we were given to create our final product. Our final product was to create anything you wanted to create, as long as it was about the Cold War and tied back to fear.
For my product, I created a 10 ish minute long video essay about how the Cold War affected pop culture and Americana during the Cold War, and how it still affects culture today.
Due to the uniqueness of this project, we not only had a driving question, but also an inquiry question we created ourselves to help guide us through the project.
Driving Question: How has fear been used as a political, defensive, and cultural tool to shape our society?
Inquiry Question: How has the fear and patriotism of the Cold War affected pop culture and Americana
My final product ⬆️
https://garlics-make-uam.craft.me/coldwar
A doccument containing everything I did to create the video ⬆️ (sources, media, etc.)
I would say I am very proud of my video and how it turned out, although I did have a lot of issues creating my video.
Firstly, my script was initially drastically different from how it is now. When I had just over a week left to complete my video, I was still working on my script. Over the weekend, I spend the vast majority of my Saturday working on that script, although when I reviewed it on Sunday, I came to find that I strayed too far from my initial topic. It took me about half an hour just to come to the decision that I had to restart, and I erased all of my script, over 4 hours of work that ended up amounting to nothing. I took this loss and remade my script using the rest of the time I had on that weekend.
The second time during this project I had to take a major hit was when I was extending my video by adding two sections. It wasn’t until after I had completed both sections that I noticed the video was 15 minutes long and would be too boring to watch. I ended up fully removing an entire 4 minute long section of my video in the end to make it work, and this section also happened to be my favourite section of the video, the only problem was it just didn’t flow right with the rest of the video.
Although it was difficult and very time consuming, I did learn a lot about staying committed and resilient throughout this experience, which is a useful skill I intend to bring to other projects.
Overall, I personally enjoyed this new and unique format of creative freedom in order to create a final product, and I also think that this video is one of if not the best product I’ve ever created in PLP. This video is definitely the best I’ve made in its format, and I intend to keep improving, creating better and better videos in the future.
As the answer to the driving question, fear has been used to demonize our enemy, induce paranoia, and even increase patriotism as a counteraction to fear. Fear has shaped us and our society as a whole, and it will be ever present in our culture as it drives us forward into the future.