Prom 2011

It was the morning of May 14th 2011 and Leah awoke early. It was the morning of her senior Prom and the previous night she barely slept, she was so excited. She had been waiting months for this day. She loved her dress so much and she wanted it to look perfect so she borrowed her grandmothers steamer to steam her dress. She was most looking forward to taking pictures with all of her friends so she wanted to look her best. She made hair and makeup appointments at the most expensive salon she could find in Minneapolis. While she was driving to her appointments her car broke down. Her mother and father were at her sisters soccer game in Hudson and all of her friends were at their appointments and by the time she got a hold of her parents and they showed up she had missed her appointments.
She was very mad because she was awful at doing her own hair and the only make up she knew how to use was mascara. When she got home she was in a very bad mood so she thought to cheer her up she would go look at her beautiful dress. When she go to the bathroom she found that she had steamed her dress for much too long and it was dank and smelled awful. So she tried drying it in her dryer. While her dress was drying she decided to go get the boutineer she had ordered for her date. When she got there the florist said they did not have any order under her name and that they were quite busy and did not have time to make her one.
When she got back home she checked on her dress. She took it out of the dryer and found it unharmed. She went to try it on so she may feel better about everything that was going wrong. It turned out that it had shrunk 6 sixes in the wash and she could not even fit it over her waist. Her mother had her old prom dress and luckily it was the perfect size for Leah. It was possible the ugliest dress she had ever seen, it was bright orange with a superfluous amount of bring blue beads. She had to wear something though. She cried for a while about her completely ruined plans but her mother reminded her that it wasn't about what she looked like it was about having a great time with her friends and with her date. She finally calmed down and went to her friends house to get picked up by the limo.
The limo never came, it turned out that the reservation was made on a bogus site. Leah's parents had made the reservation and when they later checked their credit card information it turned out there were a lot of bogus charges on her card. So instead the girls all drove together in their friends mini van and met the boys to take pictures. When they got there Leah looked all around for her date. She could not find him anywhere. None of the boys knew where he was and they said he probably found something better to do. So in all of the group pictures Leah stood by herself.
By the time they arrived to dinner Leah was so depressed she ordered half of the menu. She sat by herself and didn't talk to anyone. When dinner was over and they stood up to leave Leah heard a huge ripping noise. Her mom's dress had slit in two. Her friends quickly rushed her to the bathroom but there was nothing they could do, the dress had practically ripped in two. She couldn't take it anymore and started sobbing, her makeup ran down her face. Her friends finally found a way to wrap her dress around her like a toga.
It was the worst night of her life. She couldn't even dance by herself at the dance because she was scared her dress might fall off. She sat by the food table and ate endless chocolate strawberries. A girl sitting next to her who had eaten one two many strawberries threw up on her. An hour into the dance she called her mom to have her come pick her up. She spent the night at home alone watching Criminal Minds.

Mysterious Eggs Found All Over City Park

Early yesterday morning while Doug Anderson went for his daily early morning run is Peace Garden Park, he noticed several brightly colored eggs hidden along the path. He stopped to see if there was anything dangerous hidden in them but all he found was candy. “ You know kids these days,” said Anderson “they are always playing nasty tricks. I thought they were some kind of trap for park-goers.” There were a total of 1,454 eggs found in the park, all of them filled with some kind of candy. 

Once the news spread if the candy filled eggs there was a crowd of almost 400 people at the park. Park officials had to be called in for crowd control. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Park Official Mary Mankell, “ There were hundreds of young children running amok in the park. Whoever planted those eggs in the park obviously had a grudge on the park service.” Once the park service was finally able to clear all the children out of the park they were finally able to interview some park-goers. “It is crucial we find the culprit before he or she decides to cause another scene somewhere else,” said Mankell. So far they have not accused anyone of the crime.

Some young children were quite sure they knew who did it. “It was obviously the Easter bunny!” said 7-year-old Elizabeth Lodge, “He just must have forgotten when Easter was and came a couple days early!”  Officials have taken this and other suspicions of the “Easter bunny” into account but have so far not had any success in finding the suspect. Officials also question what caused the suspect to choose this park. Mankell reckons that the suspect must have had a bad experience in early years with eggs, “The only conclusion I can come to is that the suspect was once egged and has not been able to forget the experience.”  It took several hours for volunteers to find all the eggs in the park. “We are very thankful for the volunteers that helped us clean up the park,” said Mankell “hopefully we will be able to get fingerprints off one of the eggs so we can finally catch this public menace.” 

Last blog post!

I am very satisfied with the work my group has done for our documentary. As of today we are basically done. We just need to tweak a few things and then we will be all done! I am very happy with what we have made I think we worked really hard and we also worked really well together. I am very glad we had plenty of time to finish the editing because even getting it done with time to spare is stressful. Today as we were editing we noticed how at each step we thought that the one we were currently doing was the hardest part of the documentary. Now we know that each step is hard but I think we all had really good ideas and we listened to what each other had to say and I think we are all very excited to show everyone what we have worked so hard on!

Blog 8

This week my group and got in touch with someone from Children's Home Society for an interview. We reserved a camera for this weekend to finish up our filming. We brainstormed questions to ask my sister, the representative from Children's Home Society, and Sarah and Willie brainstormed questions to ask me. We also need to get a little bit more b-roll this weekend. I didn't realize how little time we have left and once we are all finished with our filming we are going to have to work very fast and hard on our editing.

I think the actions of the boys are "a gift of love" to everyone. Not only are they giving a "gift" to Martin Luther King Jr. by doing the things he asked them to do, but they are also showing love to everyone around them. By being nonviolent they are giving "a gift of love" to everyone around them. They were protecting the women and children with their bodies and also helping everyone else in the march by being more nonviolent bodies.

Blog #5

I am feeling pretty good about what my group has done so far. Last week we were able to interview my mom and my dad and I think they went very well. Sarah and I went to the final cut pro editing training last friday and we were able to go through both of the interviews and find parts that we think would be good for our movie. I think the training went very well too. We were also able to switch my family's home video of us in China when we got Maya to a tape we can upload to final cut and that will be a lot of good b-roll. Unfortunately some of the b-roll I took a couple weekends ago did not work, somehow the tape got messed up and the footage skips so we will have to do some more but we have plenty of time. I think we are in very good shape to have a well done trailer by Monday.

It is very hard to become a new part of a group and it is also very hard to welcome someone new into a group you are already apart or, especially if that group has been together for a long time. Even if the person who wants to be part of your group is not hurting any of the group members in any way it is still hard to accept them, for example in the piece "Fellowship" Kafka says, "He doesn't do us any harm, but he annoys us; that is harm enough".  To me this means that the sixth person is not annoying but he is new so things in the group become different which annoys the group members. It is hard to change something you are so used to and comfortable with even if it is for the better.

blog post 4

This week my group took our firt step towards starting out actual filming.
Yesterday we picked up a camera and this weekend while I'm on vacation with
My family I am going to shoot some b-roll of my family. We are still not
Quite sure what our focus is because we have not found enough time to do the
interviews with our whole group and we thought it would be best if I did not
interview my family but someone else in the group did so we are going to do
that during the week next week.

Blog #3

This week my group presented our pitch to the class, John, Alex, Ms. Hodge, and Neil. I think the pitch went fairly well, John and Alex thought we had a good idea but they started asking us how we were going to tell the story in our documentary. We did not know how to tell the story and we still are not quite sure. It is hard to plan out the story before we do the interviews because we are not sure exactly what the story is going to be. I think that the next step we need to take in making our documentary is interviewing our main subjects so we know what the focus is and what the story is, then we will know who else to interview and what questions to ask them.

As I read Research, Research, Research: You Can't Say it Enough! by Trish Das I learned that there are many different ways to research your topic. It surprised me how many ways there were. For instance I did not know that interviewing people whoa re not experts on your subject are a good way to learn more about your subject. Now that I think about it that is a very good way because you want to know how to relate your topic to the human perspective and what better way to figure out how to do that than talking to actual human beings. Another thing that surprised me was how many layers of facts there were on each subject. This reading made me realize how important research is and how much should be done.