Reflection on Landmine Awareness Campaign
This is my first blog entry on Blogger so bear with me a little in varying my page with pictures and everything because I'm a Livejournal user! I'll get the hang of it in a few days!
I haven't been here for most of the landmines topic and turned up just on time for this assignment! Oh well, onto the real stuff. I thought this was a really good experience for me, making this video about landmine awareness. Firstly, because I had never used iMovie before let alone make a movie from scratch. I've watched a lot of movies, but never really made one myself. So learning how to actually use the program was really great for me because I now know sort of how to make movies on it!
In an attempt to catch up, I read through the text book on the things I had missed out before but it proved to be beneficial for me because I haven't really studied about landmines. I had joined the Amnesty International Club in New Zealand for a bit and we were doing a campaign to ban cluster bombs and getting people to sign the petition. I didn't really know much about cluster bombs or landmines and reading the textbook has improved my knowledge in this area a lot.
In order to make the movie, I had to look through and research for some statistics and in looking through the statistics I realized how major this landmine issue actually was. I had no idea that every 15 minutes a person dies from detonating a landmine. The research that I had done basically added to my knowledge further and I thought it was good that I was actually learning something different that I didn't know was affecting the world today.
I thought it was quite a challenge for me to make this awareness movie because as I've already said, I've never used iMovie before! But also in the fact that I was somewhat unsure of the elements and the tone I wanted to give to the movie/video. I wanted to share the awareness I had gained through reading the textbook and internet websites to people who don't know about this so that they can become "enlightened" like I have. I thought if I could show the people affected by landmines and what they are generally doing when they are either harmed or killed by landmines, the audience would understand more about the severity of the issue. So I found footage of people who are actually from countries with landmines going about their daily activities, followed by a silent (deliberate...?) explosion and edited it in time to The Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel. Through this, I learned that music is a HUGE factor in media and manipulating with the audience's reactions and emotions. Given the correct music and sound effects (including silence), a video/movie/advertisement etc could draw sympathy from its viewers, anger the audience or/and frighten them. I thought this was really interesting and chose my song especially to fit in with the whole idea/tone of the movie, having watched several...(well more than several) movies and becoming wise in the ways of media/audience manipulation through my constant viewing of old movies such as a lot of Alfred Hitchcock films. Hitchcock was probably one of the best directors who used their sound really wisely and effectively at that, to create suspense (the "missing" soundtrack to The Birds anyone?), tension (The famous shower scene from Psycho) and fear (basically any Hitchcock movie...I can't think of specifics but they scare me sometimes, in a good way!).
I'm not sure if we need to write reflections about what I thought of other people's videos but I might as well because I'm on a roll! After watching the videos made by my classmates, I thought the standard of the videos were really high and very varied. I was really glad that there were so many different styles of video/movie-making which were present in those videos, from satire to in-your-face to tugging at the audiences' (well, mine at least) heartstrings. It was a really exciting experience for me and I think I've learnt a lot from this!
PS. I tend to ramble a lot. If you haven't figured from the length of this blog entry... And you'll definitely find (some pointless?) references here and there to movies I have seen or liked a lot of the time!
Labels: humanities
