MIn today’s society mental illness is becoming much more common in the younger generations. It is a growing epidemic and the adults of this world are not doing much to help these people, let alone accept the fact that mental illness is a serious issue.
Recently in my English class we learned a little about satirical content. We were assigned a task to create a visual representation of a problem that we were passionate about in a satirical format. Right away the issue of dealing with a mental illness in high school came to my mind as I have seen conflict with this happen in my own school.
I chose to create a video highlighting the point that just because you can’t physically see something wrong with a person doesn’t mean they’re not hurt. In a PE class you are allowed to sit out if you claim you are hurting, regardless of the fact that you have a note with you or not. If a student with a mental illness, such as anxiety came up to the teacher and explained to them why they could not participate they would still be forced to as there is physically nothing wrong with them and they look capable of participating in PE. This can lead to further problems and create a possible fear of coming to that class if you know that you are going to be forced into participating.
As mental illnesses, for example anxiety, become more and more common, people are starting to accept and reach out to help those who are affected by it. However there are still some people out there who just do not understand and are not willing to understand that the brain has the most power of you and your body, therefor mental illnesses can greatly effect your day to day life, stopping you from participating in some things.
Over the years of being in PLP, we have done many different types of projects varying from essays, videos, explain everything’s, and for some, even puppet shows. However, we tried a new form of project to demonstrate our learning this time, the video Essay.
Video Essay definition: A video essay is a written essay read aloud and mixed with a stream of images, sound, or video. They often explore topics in a subjective or poetic manner.
Now when we first heard the news that this would be our project following our trip to the Southwest, I wasn’t too thrilled. We watched an example in class of what one of these video essays might look like and wow it was pretty amazing. After watching it sure I was inspired to do my own and do it well, but I was a little worried because of the amount of work that was put into it as well as how well it was done. I worked with Anatolia on this project and it definitely did not end up being as good as the example we saw.
To start off the project we traveled all the way down to Tucson Arizona, and Las Vegas Nevada, (which of course isn’t necessary, but was amazing nonetheless). Before leaving for the trip we had been learning about atomic energy, the mob, and everything under the concept of fear around the time of the 50’s in Las Vegas and America. And of course we created our question for our project. For ours it was. We then took the flight, very early in the morning I might add, and traveled down to the southwest to experience and learn even more about what we had been talking about in class.
During the trip we had the opportunity to get video, pictures, interviews, and find even more information for our topics and video essays. When we returned from our trip we used all of this new information, as well as our previous knowledge from class and brought it all together in an informative expository essay. Here’s a link to the essay: Southwest Essay
After getting our Essay approved by our teachers, we moved on to the video aspect of the project. We had to take our Essay and record it as audio, with a few changes to better the video content of course. Then we took that and found videos, pictures and used our own videos, pictures and interview clips from the trip to enhance our written aspect and create an image for the viewers to use to better understand our essays. This was more challenging then expected because of course we didn’t get as many clips and pictures from Vegas as we had hoped because we ended up altering our topic when we returned from the trip. At first we were focusing on the mob so we got a lot of footage for that, but when we returned we changed our focus more to the atomic bomb and the economy of Vegas. And it is completely our fault for not recording everything, which now looking back we should have. Since we didn’t we have had to find and create our own footage and images to use for our video. This has made things a little more challenging for us.
Honestly we had a slow and rough start to this project. We didn’t collaborate well and therefor we were left with a terrible and not finished first draft. I spent hours after receiving the feedback and critique fixing, adding, and editing our video. It took a long time to get our video to an acceptable state, and I still wish I could go back and edit a few more things.
Before this unit I had never heard of a video Essay and when I first heard about them I was not excited to be creating my own. After completing this project I realized that it wasn’t that bad to do. I always have enjoyed writing essays, (well not enjoyed, but they’re probably my favourite to do over most other things), so by incorporating an essay into a project I used one aspect of a project that I liked and used another, the video, as something that I need to improve on and want to get better at. This project showed me a new form of presenting my learning and I’m glad we did it. It was something different and engaged me in the project more then doing something that we normally do would have.
