Peer Groups

Welcome back!

Today is the day that I met with my peers!

During todays class, my teacher assigned us to different people from different groups in order to discuss and advise each other about our progress so far. So I mentioned to them the different thoughts about our subject. I told them we wanted to do the elderly since in todays society, we feel they are very looked down upon and we weren't sure whether or not to go down a culture, life lessons or life regrets topic.

So this is the advice they told me:
They started by saying that honestly going into the whole culture aspect would be very narrow and instead, if we do the life regrets and life lessons it could be a broader subject and its much more interesting. They agreed that still using the same interviewees would be pretty cool and just having it be more of and undertone subject would be best.

I than remembered that my teacher, Mrs. Stoklosa had once said that we need to make sure that if we're doing the documentary, we have to make it so that it can continue and go on. Meaning that it can be aired on national television. My group and I had always been very confused about this aspect of the project so I asked them how they thought it would be best to incorporate this in.

Antonio, one of my peers actually gave great advice. He began to talk about how here in the USA, the elderly are not taken good care of. In other countries he said, like China, hispanic countries and such, elderly people are seen as wise, important people. Here in the USA its almost the complete opposite. He than said that it would be pretty cool to see us incorporate some of that towards the end of our documentary. In other words, he recommended starting with the life lessons and than somehow merging into the topic of how people treat their elders.

We all agreed that if we had time to interview the same elders family members, it would be interesting to hear what they have to say about them.

Sammy also mentioned to remember that if we decide to just do life regrets and life lessons we need to mainly focus on the past. For example, for B-roll she said, its key to make this highly focused on pictures and don't do anything about the present.

I plan on sharing all of this information with Gaby and Maria next class.

Until next time!