Groundhog Day

Yesterday was supposed to be a day of some interviewing and editing with Jimmy's camera. However, something of huge importance came up yesterday that prevented us from performing our tasks, so we moved those tasks to today and... lone and behold Jimmy comes down a with a bad case of food poisoning.

Needless to say I have no edited interviews to present tonight, but I do have our game plan.

Within our documentary as a whole, we are planning on using three different elements of media: interviews, statistics/facts and aesthetically pleasing factors such as pictures and quotes.

Interviews.

Interviews will be conducted in order to gain information about students and their travels, whether it's through personal experiences or an OSU study abroad program. Between Jimmy and I, we have the names of 14 students and three teachers who we plan to interview. These people have either studied or traveled abroad at some points in their lives, are currently abroad (we will contact them through email and skype) or are planning to travel in the near future. The point of these interviews is to obtain a fresh perspective on how being overseas can affect an individual in such a major way. We will be asking some very generic questions (i.e. where did you go, why there, etc.) along with some very personal questions (i.e. what kind of things did you realize about your life and home when you were away?) Through these questions and many more, we hope to eventually show that travelling allows people to feel apart of a global community, instead of solely a citizen of a city or states.

Statistics.

No claim is ever worth listening to unless it has facts to back it up. To bring some reality and facts to our documentary and to prove our claim further, we'll be doing our research. We'd like to include stats that show where people are going, reasons they are going there, why people aren't going at all, funding, etc. For example, according to Open Doors 2006, "the number of students studying abroad increased 8% in the year 2006... with a special increasing interest in destinations in Asia and South America."

Aesthetics

With this element of the documentary, we are adding "texture" and "depth" to an otherwise film-only project. We plan to get our hands on pictures taken during student travels and throw them into the show every once in a while because we feel that a picture can often show what words cannot. Pictures like this, for example, show fun and unity in ways that an interview simply can't: