My multimedia group met before break to discuss ideas for the project, and after investigating a few we decided on the topic of the electoral college and voting in our country. At the age of eighteen, we have all fairly recently gained the ability to vote, and it is important that with this democratic responsibility comes knowledge of how the process works in our country. However, it seems that more and more voters (and young voters especially) are beginning to doubt whether they actually have a say in our democracy—in short, does our vote really even matter. Our country has a fairly low voter turnout rate in elections (under 60% of eligible voters in the last presidential election), and perhaps the whole voting system is in need of some reform to reassure voters that their opinion does matter.
For our video, we want to get a feel for what our fellow college students think about voting and whether they believe their individual vote counts in our county, explain how our voting system/electoral college works, perhaps interview an expert (probably a Penn State professor) in the field, and present some possible suggestions for reform. It will be critical for our video to engage the audience from the start, and that is why we are planning on starting out with clips from interviews of college students answering our questions on the street—questions about whether they vote or not and whether they think their vote means something. The editing of these interviews into short, rapid-fire clips for the opening with quality audio and visual components (most likely including some cutaways and a lot of transitions) will be critical to grabbing a viewer’s attention and interest—it is important for us to instill a sense of relevancy from the start so that the topic means something. We’ll probably conduct these interviews on the streets of State College, and it will be important to get enough people to answer our questions to make a meaningful opening reel.
As for responsibilities, we discussed that it is critical for all of us to have an understanding of our topic. We’re going to have to conduct a fair amount of research about our topic in order to present it with ethos. I know that I for one don’t have a crystal-clear understanding of how our voting process works. Since I have editing experience with iMovie, a big part of my role will also be the editing process, but we acknowledged that roles and responsibilities in a group are fluid—in short, we’re all going to work to get the job done, even if what we have to do falls outside of our designated “responsibilities.”
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