I thought that this B-Roll project was a huge success. On Thursday, my group and I attended a conference in the Pfenning Alumni Center that focused on food waste in the Lehigh Valley. We got tons of B-Roll footage which was a great addition to our B-Roll film. We also added footage in from LaFarm as well as Lafayette as a whole. Throughout our mini film, we wanted to try to portray a storyline. We aimed to make the transitions of our takes to be meaningful instead of just putting random shots of B-Roll together. We also thought the music was a nice touch to the film, because we believed it really drove the scenes together. I had a great job working on this with Kiera and Josh, and all three of us are extremely excited to work on the final project.

After some thought, I decided that I am going to interview one of my sorority sisters, Anna Evinski, for my project. Anna is one of the most intelligent people I have ever met. What makes her so special is that her dream is to become an investment banker. She is in the investment club on campus, and has been interviewing for internships for next summer like crazy. Although she sounds like any other college student, there are very few women who take on the role of going into investment banking. She doesn’t care that what she wants to do is mainly full of men. She is an extremely hard worker, and has an amazing outlook on life. Just last week, she secured a position at Barclay’s for next summer.

I want to interview Anna in Simon Hall (the Econ building) for my interview. I want viewers to see her in her habitat. I also want the Broll to be shot in her bedroom doing work, and her at investment club. Some of the questions I want to ask include: why did you decide to go into field? Why investment banking? What was your mindset going into these interviews? Would you consider yourself a minority in this field? What are your career aspirations?

Anna is one of the hardest working people I have ever met. I am really excited to interview her because I feel like a ton of film students don’t get to hear about other majors at the college and their obstacles that they have to go through. I truly am looking forward to it.

In the article “Mirrors Without Memories”, the film The Thin Blue Line is examined in a very particular way. Linda Williams talks about Morris’ approach to the film, and how the documentary has a hypnotic pace. She also believes that Morris doesn’t tell the viewers all the truths about the film.

After speaking to Professor Smith about this film, I realize that I didn’t think deep enough about the overall theme of the film. I think I was too focused on the specifics of the film instead of focusing on the overall meaning and message. The overall message of the film is the aspect of memory. Everyone’s memory in the film is different which brings all the characters in the documentary together. Williams writes, “the truth of the past is traumatic, violent, and unrepresentable in images. It is obscured by official lies masking the responsibility of individual agents,” (14). This proves that this film was full of many people’s memories, and not all of them accurately portrayed what happened the night of the crime.

I always appreciate these types of documentaries because it allows viewers to look into the lives of people that we may not know about. I really loved this docuseries. Many documentaries when they cover this topic are very serious, but this one was able to combine the seriousness of adoption and make it comedic as well. I think they did a great job making each of the episodes short and to the point. Each of the episodes had something happening in them that made it very interesting to watch. As I viewed them, I felt very immersed in their lives and was very curious as to what their next steps were in the adoption process. They made these videos very fun to watch, especially when they added their heads on cartoons and tried to make fun of themselves. I am really excited for Nicole to Skype our class because I want to hear why her and Kristan decided to make their journey a documentary.

I really enjoyed Robert Seidman’s talk. It was very interesting to learn about his career and what he has accomplished in his life. I believe the most interesting film of his that the audience viewed was his film titled “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America”. The clip that was shown was extremely interesting, and made me want to watch the documentary entirely. It was even more captivating when Seidman told the audience that he was an atheist, and how he had trouble getting along with everyone else working on the documentary because their religious beliefs did not match.

I also found it interesting that Seidman was able to take on so many projects at one time. It was really nice to hear that he loved his liberal arts experience at Williams, too. I love Lafayette, but it was nice to hear from someone much wiser than I that one of his best decisions was pursuing a liberal arts degree. He had many smart things to say to us young documentarians, and I really appreciated his visit.

We hope to begin this documentary “The Loss We Can Gain” by framing the problem of food waste in the Lehigh Valley area. We will do this by interviewing people who have been community activists by fighting food waste and promoting food justice in the Lehigh Valley. We don’t want this documentary just to point out a known problem, but rather show what Easton is doing to combat this problem. We will show the steps Easton has taken to tackle this problem by telling the story of the pilot composting projects that have been taking place over the past few years. These programs have been very successful and the EPA wants to roll out more programs like these during their conference that will be hosted at Lafayette this November. We hope to capture the conference to highlight the future plans of the food waste problem and we will flush out those details via interviews.

–Josh Klien, Kiera Kehoe, Aidan Trevisan

I wanted to talk about events that have occurred in the news recently. So many sexual assault allegations have been appearing in the news, and each time I view the stories they become harder and harder to watch. Harvey Weinstein was such a surprise to so many people, however it did not shock everything because of how frequent sexual assault is on the news. I also read an article today about McKayla Maroney, a 21 year old Olympic gold medalist and how she recently came forward about being sexually assaulted by team doctor. Last year in my Women in Film course, we watched a documentary called “The Hunting Ground” which was one of the most powerful films, let alone documentaries, I have ever seen. It is on Netflix, and I strongly encourage everyone to watch it. It talks about sexual assault on college campuses and it truly opened my eyes to so much. I hope some of you view this and find it as powerful as I did.

I have really enjoyed reading “Directing the Documentary” by Michael Rabiger so far. I appreciate the style of the book: I like how there is figures to explain what he is saying. He also makes the text easy to read and understand but in an extremely knowledgeable way. My favorite part in this chapter was when he focused on how to get a good education. Rabiger lists bullet points on how the reader can plan their future. His advice included listing your key experiences, and reminded readers that life has “marked you”. I think this book can really be beneficial in anyone’s life that wants to continue film in their future because it gives a ton of advice for the young filmmaker.

Rabiger also touches on the importance of creativity. He says its getting harder and harder to find unique content because so many films are being produced. I learned that it is important to gain as much experience as possible, and to lean on friends and colleagues about ideas because it will help any filmmaker in the long run. I really enjoyed this chapter and look forward to reading more!

Before I viewed The Thin Blue Line (1988), I read the synopsis on Google and realized that it was a crime documentary which are my favorite. After I watched the film, I realized it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. To be quite honest, I was a little disappointed. I feel like the film was kind of slow. I also felt like through the entirety of the film, the same information was portrayed throughout. I found myself at some points being a little bored, because I thought that I already had heard the piece of information that was being said in the past. However, I really enjoyed the interviews between the eyewitnesses. Although they did not witness the actual crime taking place, it was interesting to hear their take on the story. All of the witnesses provided some really in depth detail that made me seem like I was actually at the crime scene, which I enjoyed.

My favorite shot in the film had to be towards the end, when the popcorn was popping in the machine. There was also a close up of the clock ticking, which I found very enticing because it makes the reader anxious for the characters in the film. This film also brings up the conversation of how police officers are treated. I definitely want to hear everyone’s opinion on this film and I look forward to discussing it!

Before attending Brooke Gladstone’s talk, I was very excited to hear her speak because I read her book “The Influencing Machine” during my freshman year at Lafayette in FAMS 101. Although it has been quite a while since reading her book, I do remember the impact she had on me as a first year FAMS student, and I was very excited to hear her speak about what she is so passionate about. Throughout her talk, she made some very solid points: she spoke a lot about fake news and how it is able to control people’s minds. She also touched on how people should not get their news from Facebook. I found this point extremely interesting because I do indeed get some of my news from Facebook. It’s easy for anyone to go on the app and just scroll through the billions of posts a day. She not only said that Facebook is taking over, but technology is. What I also found interesting is the fact that she told us to delete one app a day. Although I do not completely agree with this, I did find it interesting because more apps are being created every day, and some of them can be very beneficial to a person’s life. I especially enjoyed when Brooke spoke about the power of radio and how powerful a human voice is. I cohost a radio show on WJRH, and I really appreciated how she talked about her life in radio and how it had such a great impact on her life. Overall, I really enjoyed her talk, and it was so nice to match a book I read in class’ author to a face!