Change is Gonna Come Film Project

Cameron Anderson

LIFE (Literature Intensive and Film Experience)

Change is Gonna Come PBL Reflection

11/30/2020

This semester in LIFE, we embarked on a film project regarding change. We were allowed to choose between three different topics. Social Change, Personal Change, and Environment Change. I personally chose Environmental Change, because I feel like it is a topic that pretty much everyone can get behind at some extent, because most of us understand that we are sharing this planet. I specifically talked about humanity extending its reach too far into nature, causing it to respond in the form of natural disasters on scales never seen before.

I’m going to be honest. I did zero planning for this film project. For the majority of the semester, I was suffering from a mental illness I never knew I had. My attention span, desire to succeed, and motivation were hampered, and beyond just my Junior year of high school. Virtual learning was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. I can point to several times during the Fall 2020 semester, that I was failing several classes, and not due to any lack of intelligence or ability to learn, but simply due to a lack of attention or motivation, and it could not have come at a worse time. For this project, I did zero script writing, zero storyboarding, and zero research. In fact, I didn’t even know that I’d choose environmental change as my topic, until several days after the project was due, and I decided that I would finally get to throwing together something passable.

The process of creating this film was simple. If you have watched it, and have seen the rubric it may seem lazy, and thrown together for a grade, but honestly, it was more satisfying to me than going outside to record some stupid video about being a better person. In my opinion, I would rather create something that I can be proud of, and not cringe at every time it creeps it’s way onto my screen. Something that I can be happy about knowing that people who have my future in their hands can look at and enjoy, and not something that they throw into a heap of all the other kids who were forced to do a project, so they got on their phones and recorded themselves talking about personal change, or about how important it is to ‘get out and vote’. Sorry, I have personality, but more importantly, I have dignity, and enough so that I’m not willing to waste my time with a garbage film I’m going to forget about in a few months.

So I know that this reflection, like pretty much all of my work for this semester, does not exactly line up with the rubric, but I’m happy with it. I genuinely feel like anyone who reads this knows exactly what I’m saying, and even if they think it’s childish, or immature, will understand the position that I’m in, and understand why I went off script to produce something that I am proud of.