Final Artist Statement

The individual project is the documentation of what changes the JPNA area has gone through and what it is gearing towards through the interview with Mrs. Arlene Otis. I began to gather information about JPNA on the internet and also the packet that Professor Greene had handed out to my class at the beginning of the semester. The packet gave me an understanding of what and where JPNA originated from. Through my group project, interviewing long standing residences, I was only able to attend one interview. The interview was with Mrs. Arlene Otis. This interview was the first of four interviews that were lined up for us through Mr. George Lewis. Mr. Lewis is an active member of JPNA. All present at this interview were Joseph Brady, Niraj Keshvala, Professor Greene, and I representing FILM150. The interview was conducted at Mrs. Otis’ home. The interview lasted for forty minutes.

As I sat there watching the footage, I was trying to get the key points of the interview. There were many comments she had said that stood out to me. She spoke about the changes in the neighborhood and how she had decided to stay in the neighborhood. She was one of the citizens that stood up and fought for their community. She was not going to let anyone intimidate her or take advantage of her.

Editing is one of the most tedious tasks I have encountered with this project. It took me longer to get an eight second clip than just playing the whole interview. I used Windows Movie Maker to do the editing. I have never used anything with film before this project. I used the camcorder on vacations, but I have never done anything on this caliber before. I used my own camcorder for the interview. Using an editing program, I had to upload the footage on to a computer in order to do anything with it. The camcorder was the same version that we can check out from the media room at school but just older. It had all the wiring that I supposedly need to get started. Hooking up the camera to the computer was the easy part. It seemed easy enough until the computer kept on prompting me to download the required drivers for the camera. Getting frustrated, I got on to Sony.com and chatted to a technical support representative. He was very helpful and told me that I needed an IEEE cable in order to get my footage onto the computer. After I purchased the fire wire, it was smooth sailing after that. That was probably the easiest step in the whole project. The rest of process was pretty challenging. Editing was a whole different ball game in itself. It takes lots of patience and repetitive steps. Editing helps make a clip look more attractive. It also helps with weird transitions in conversations a lot smoother. Sometimes written texts are better than hearing questions asked from the interviewer. Editing is a game of the process of elimination. Not only did I edit footage of the interview, I also edited music with this project. This process was a bit easier than editing footage. I was getting better with the editing process so the music part was not too bad. I had to play with the volume control, fade out, and time frame of the music I wanted to work with.

Service learning was an interesting component in FILM150. I was not sure where this was going to tie the general topics together, but as I sat down looking at the different things I was doing it made sense. The multicultural component was the service learning and gave me opportunities to go somewhere different. With the different things I have obtained from the area, I got to use it towards my final project. The film part was the usage of both my digital camera and camcorder for this course. This is the first time I have really used these two items to its full potential.