Project Reflection

With this monster of a project finally completed I feel that it is time to look back on the experience.

I enjoyed the girls in my group, we all got along well and everyone contributed an important part of the project, and we could not have done it without each and every one of us.

I enjoyed working on our topic and only wish that we would have had more time to complete the project so that we could have taken it up a notch on the level of excellence. But as it is, I believe that we did a wonderful job at completing our objective of showing the personal and cultural reasons why people get tattoos.

I am so happy that the project is finally over with. Video, research paper, presentation and all. This was an extremely time consuming project that owned nearly all of my free time this term. I enjoyed the experience, but am very glade to be done.

This was a fun and challenging project to end my University Seminar experience on. Now it is time to look forward to next term and whatever that may hold for me.

~Chelsea

FINISHED!!

DONE DONE DONE!!! WE ARE DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh my GOD! After three FULL days in the lab, my group and I have finally produced a finished video!!!

Sleep now please...

~Chelsea

Weekend of Death!!!

Okay so today was the second day in a row that my group and I spent the ENTIRE day in the main computer lab working on editing our video.

Friday I got to the lab at around 12:00pm and didn't leave till around 7:00pm! Today was pretty much the same except that I slept in a little late and got to the lab at 1:00pm and HAD to leave at 7:00pm because that was when the lab closed.

We had to REDO so much today because of the way the Macs in the lab save, it saved as a finalized video, so we couldn't work with it, so we pretty much started all over. Then we figured it would do that to us again if we tried to do it all as one video, so we came up with the idea of splitting it up by section and finalizing them separately. I took Japanese today, and FINISHED IT, it will not need to be worked on any more, and that is such a nice feeling. It will be so great when we can say that for this whole project.

Well, another long day in the tomorrow. Time for bed.

~Chelsea

Storyboard and more...

Okay so our group storyboard is done! It features amazing art work by yours truly, ha ha not. But it is passable. We spent a few hours the last weekend getting it all done to show Professor Marinak this week. Here is a picture of it:

This weekend the members of my group are gathering our own personal research, photos and videos to bring to our meeting on Sunday. On Sunday we will be fleshing out our video, getting it ready to be edited, and even beginning the editing process.

Personal research paper... so far I have a lot of my research, but could do more, and my outline done. I need to start working on my rough draft soon :(

Well that's it for now. Way too much homework both for this class and my others, but there is nothing I can do about it :(

Now to go have a homework filled, fun-less weekend. Yay...

~Chelsea

Videos from far away...

Okay so my good friend Kayla's boyfriend (Andrew) is considering getting a traditional Japanese tattoo since he went to Japan and absolutely fell in love with it. Andrew however goes to Oregon State University in Corvallis. And since I live here in Ashland and how no plans of visiting Corvallis I thought I might be out of luck when it came to interviewing him. But by some chance of fate Kayla was going up to Corvallis to visit her boyfriend Andrew on Valentines day and gave me the prime opportunity to send her with my camera to interview him. :)

Here is the video- she did pretty good considering my instructions were vague.
* The video has been modified to better fit in this blog- sorry about the poor quality.

A few weeks in...

So its a few weeks into this project and although I feel like my group has been doing almost everything we can to get together and work on the project, with our conflicting schedules and personal lives it's beginning to look like it's going to be a struggle to finish this project by the time it is due.

Finding people to video of things we need is proving a challenge, with me not being able to find an old man with a war tattoo, and Whitney having the tattoo artist keep canceling on her. This project is truly more than we expected.

The editing process I am sure will take forever! We are going to have to give up a whole weekend to just sit down for hours and crank this video out.

And to top it all off we have our personal research projects! Like this video wasn't already enough! I just don't have the time, and so I know that something is going to have to suffer in it's quality in order for everything to get done. It's all just a matter of what that ends up being, wither it's the video, the presentation, the personal research paper, homework from my other classes, or even my sleep. I'm going to have to give up the quality of something just to finish it all.

~Chelsea

Still Trucking...

Okay so this has been kind of a slow and painful process, it seems that my group and I try to get together a lot so we can make some progress but I feel like we are not getting anywhere fast. I have high hopes for our plans of working on our own on assigned time periods and seeing how far we can get alone before coming together for another group meeting and going, "uh so what do we do now?"

I am also struggling to gather some interesting footage for the old Sailor/Navy tattoo bit I want to include in our video. It would be so ideal to find some old World War II veteran who severed in the Navy and has like a anchor tattoo on his arm. Like this guy (Left)! I wish I knew someone like that and could interview them! :( If anyone does know someone who fits this description (or something close to it) drop me off a comment down below! :)

So we are still putting along, and the deadline is just getting closer and closer. Starting to feel the pressure? I am.

~Chelsea

Plans for the Weekend

So everyone but me in the group seems to be gone one day or the other because of sickness or other things... :( oh well. I have been relating information back and forth between my other group members about the plan for the weekend.

Plan #1- Re-interview Tito.
The last video we shot of Tito ended up being to quiet, so we are going to have to re-shoot. Probably a good plan anyways so we can tighten it up, he had a few too many "umm"s last time for my liking. That is planned for Saturday.

Plan #2- Tattoo Parlor
Many calls have been placed to the local tattoo parlors, but so far no one has called back. A continued effort will be made to get in contact with an artist to hopefully set up an interview, but if all else fails it looks like this Saturday we will be driving out to them to talk in person.

Plan #3- Editing and Other Work
Meeting in the library on Sunday to work out the kinks of what we have so far. Each member will be bringing their own idea of what our story board should look like, and we are going to flesh out a final one out of those. Next we will be messing around with the footage we have on the computer, so we know how to use the programs before it comes to the end and we have no idea what we are doing. Other things to be decided then.

So that's our weekend. Wish us luck :)

A Late Introduction

I appologize for taking so long to finally start up this blog, but here I go anyways.

For those of you who do not already know, I am taking my University Seminar 103 class at Southern Oregon University. University Seminar, or USem for short, is like beginning college english that is mandatory for all freshmen. For this term my class is doing Oral History reports in a video form. My group in particualr is doing our report on the history of tattoos with a focus on people's own personal stories about them.

Now that you are up to date, here is what is going on now. It is week four and my group has been both working individually and together to gather information, pictures, and video. Over the weeks i have interviewed a few of my friends by myself and got thier personal tattoo stories. Like my family friend, Jenifer, who has a flower on her hand. She got that tattoo at age 16, and it was originally just the intitials "J n J", after her friends who had died in a car accedent. Later in her life she had it changed into a flower and still says that the loops that go off to the sides are "J"s. On Friday we all got together to interview Tito about his Samoan tattoos and the history of tattoos among the Samoan people.

Well that is all for now, I will try and keep up on this blog weekly. Wish me luck.

~Chelsea