Place Is Us

Hey everyone, its been awhile but I’m finally back and posting again. It’s a new year which means new projects to stress about and today I’m going to be talking about one such project. As you can see there’s a video at the top of this post, that is the final product of this project and if you’ve watched it you would know the basic background of this project, but if you haven’t let me break it down for you. Over a month ago PLP 9 went on a trip to Alberta to see if we could answer the driving question to our project: How Does Place Impact Who We Are? We were assigned different groups to focus on, I got artists, and we had to interview people from our specific groups and ask questions that related to your concept or thesis for your video. We then had to create a mini documentary based off of the answers we got from our interviews for the final product. However before we could even think about our videos there were some milestones that we had to complete first.

Creative Response

The first milestone that we had to do was a Creative Response to a lesson about how living in BC impacts who we are. We were let outside to go and sit somewhere and think about how we personally are impacted by place, we then had to come up with a creative way to share what we came up with. While I was sitting outside I figured out that since I went to school that was surrounded by forest I was a lot more active and played a lot more games outside than if I was, say, in the city. This activity really just helped me understand the importance of place and how it can change a whole life style depending on the circumstance. Thinking about it now I believe that I became much more invested in the project after this milestone because I realized just how much place impacted our identity and I wanted to see how it impacted others as well.

In my video I talk about how artists are impacted by the views of a community on the arts itself. Although I believe that’s a great conclusion there were a few steps that I had to take to get to it, first of all I had to learn about lenses. I know you may be wondering what a lens is, well it is like looking of reading something through a specific perspective. Let’s say I was reading an article on the trans mountain pipeline. If I wanted to read it through, say, a political lens I would think about how this event would affect the politics in this area. However if I was to look at this event through the social lens I would be thinking about how it would affect the community, this could mean that my view on the subject could change depending on what lens I’m looking through at the time. 

Now that I knew what a lens was I had to apply it to my research on artists for our trip. To make it easier in myself I decided to focus on the Social lens which still left multiple different paths open of where I was going to go with this project. I could focus on how messages in art affected the communities or how people affected the art itself but I decided to focus on how peoples views on the arts affected them. Since my topic of choice was so dependent on the views of specific communities and how artist felt as part of the community there wasn’t much research I could do on those specific points. I tried to find as much as I could on the general views on art and artists so I could come up with a general list of questions that would hopefully help me get the answers that I needed to answer the driving question.

Finally it was time to head out on our trip to Alberta and in complete PLP fashion we were given another assignment that we would use to help us document our trip. If you remember you remember from Oregon last year we had to fill out a book template with pictures and paragraphs to help document what we did each day, Daily Note was that but with a lot more freedom. All we got each day was a prompt that we had to answer in either long paragraphs of short point form, it was up to us to formate it. Although at times Daily Note seemed tedious thinking about it know I think I really benefited from doing it. It gave me a break from the craziness that is PLP trips and allowed me to quietly reflect on what we had done that day and what I learned from it. It also got me to listen more carefully to what a speaker was saying and try to relate it back to the driving question just in case that was what the Daily Note was about that day.

My First Draft

Once we got back from Alberta we started working on our video right away, the first step to creating it was writing a script for it. I had already started to plan out what I was going to say in my video the day before since it was almost a full day of driving and I didn’t have anything better to do. Since it was Ms.Willemse driving the car we were listening to podcasts about various subjects, because of this my script was almost written as if it was a podcast. Since I had basically written it for a podcast I had to do some really deep thinking about how all the answers I got from my interviews fit together into one big picture. What I came up with was that the lack of funding from the government for the arts because of their political views meant that there aren’t a lot of opportunities for artists. This leaves many aspiring artists to have to work many jobs just to survive, forcing many to give up on art and going into other professions instead. Using this knowledge I created the first draft of my Alberta video which you can see up above, although it was ok there were some audio and visual problems that I had to work out. However once I finished that I had a reflective video that showed one of the many ways that place impacts artists.

If I was to say what I mostly got out of this project it would be how to prepare and conduct an interview. I know what types of questions to come up with before hand and how to make sure that the person you’re interviewing isn’t uncomfortable at any time during the interview. These skill will hopefully help me later this year and for the rest of my life. But to answer the driving question, everyone is impacted by place in one way or another. Sometimes we can be impacted by the same thing but it can impact different people in drastically different ways and sometimes we can be impacted in both small and big ways by things like environment and politics. However no matter what you think, your life has been shaped by place in some way.