Documentary Analysis

The Invisible War, a documentary by Kirby Dick, is about Military Sexual Assault. The movie shows the awful military sexual assault through several interviews with real-life Military rape victims. The 97-minute-long film is about the experiences and consequences of seven or eight Veterans that were victimized during their service. There were almost 100 people interviewed in total for the film.

The interviews captured the vulnerable experiences that these veterans had and helped the viewer empathize with them. The movie brings forth a wave of emotions from the viewer with the miserable testimonies from the relatives of the rape victims who explain how hard it was for that person. The interviews were also very emotionally effective because they usually ended with the interviewee crying.

The film uses archival footage (WWII videos of the military happily asking women to join), which is a bitter contrast to the image that the victims give. The main interviewee was Kori Cioca, a military rape victim who has PTSD, Anxiety, Depression, and a facial injury that left her unable to chew. She was raped during her deportation by one of her superiors and she then had to report the rape to the rapist.      

The movie addresses the issue of the military’s failure to support the veterans working for them. What this issue basically is is that the military requires soldiers to put their lives in jeopardy for the country but refuses to give them the most basic protection against rapists in the armed forces. Most likely for legal reasons, the movie doesn’t disclose the names of rapists, only the location and rank of each officer connected with the victim. During the documentary, high military officials tried to defend the system by showing unprofessional military videos that warn soldiers about sexual assault.

The director incorporated text by putting in statistics of the number of people affected by sexual assault in the military. The movie uses several cinematic effects throughout it that makes it a very interesting documentary to watch. There is no real plot but there is definitely a structure to it. The victims and their families are interviewed first, followed by interviews with people somehow related to the story. An example of this was when Kori was interviewed about the legal part of her assault and the next interview was with a military executive about the legal procedure for prosecuting a military official.

       The director decided not to reenact any part of the film for obvious reasons, so there wasn’t really any dramatic aspect. The music was only really noticeable during the interviews where soft music played in the background. This is an excellent and compelling documentary and I strongly recommend it.

Here's the trailer:

Pippin (for the last time)

Alright, I know I've posted a lot recently about Pippin but this is the last time I promise. This weekend was our three and only performances and they were all fantastic. There were a few mistakes in each one of course but overall the shows were amazing. We sold out all three nights which was fantastic to see a full house every time I looked into the audience.

Going onstage, especially opening night, was extremely nerve-wracking but also exciting. Once I got through half of my first song at the very beginning, the nerves went away. I can't really explain the awesomeness of the show in words it's something you had to have seen.

The past 2.5 years have been such an amazing experience and I'm so lucky to have been given this opportunity with this amazing group of people. There are fifteen of us which means we've only lost one person whereas most other conservatories lose five or six. Everyone in the cast has such an incredible personality and even though the show is over we'll all keep in touch and do shows together and meet up a few times per year.

All this past summer and this school year so far I had the plan to do a sport all three seasons (golf in the fall, track in the winter, and track in the spring) but now I realize that I thought this because I figured I'd still have conservatory to give me some aspect of theater. Since it's over I think a good balance will be doing the school musical, Into the Woods, in the spring. It would be a good balance having two seasons of sports and one of theater and maybe I'll do a show over the summer, who knows.



Here are just some pictures of me with some of the cast members before and after the show, and also a few all cast photos:

This is me (Leading Player, bottom left), Rees (Pippin, top left), Everleigh (Fastrada, top right), and Sydney (Louise, bottom right) on our journey to Starbucks before our final performance:

This is me and Rees after our last show: 

This is me, Zoe, Everleigh, Hannah, Olivia, and Sydney after our show (there are a few tears because it was our last performance):

This is me as Leading Player and Gill as Catherine before our second show:

This is our entire cast just smiling:

This is a slightly more representative picture of our group:

And finally, this is a picture of the Musical Theater Class of 2012 as our characters from Pippin:

I love each and every one of these people more than I ever would have thought and I'm so excited to have future adventures with them :)

Pippin! (again)

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about Pippin, the show that I'm in as part of the Musical Theater Conservatory at Imagination Stage. This week is our last week rehearsing until the show opens on Friday so our tech week started today and we have rehearsal today, Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Tech week is just where instead of running through the show completely we focus primarily on where the lights are and when the sounds come in and how the scenes change smoothly. We only got through about a third of the show today cause we had to stop multiple times in each scene but tomorrow we're finishing finding the lighting cues. That will leave Tuesday and Thursday for us to run through the show completely with all of the lights and sounds that are supposed to be there. Since this was part of tech week, we got to wear our costumes and makeup for the rehearsal which made me extremely happy and really excited because of how stellar my costume is. I'll explain it in some detail now. For a base top I have a pinkish-reddish and silver diagonally striped long sleeve shirt and for base bottoms I just have red leggings and jazz shoes. On the top next I have a black cropped sweatshirt with the arms cut off and silver spiked shoulder pads (I always have the hood on). Then I put on a skinny black tie and a leather collar with silver studs on it around my neck. Next there's a thick black waist belt with silver studs and another belt that's the same type as the seat belts on an airplane with old bottle caps on it. Now for my pants it's a bit hard to describe first they were just wide red and black tie-dyed jeans but then our ridiculously artsy and amazing costume designer cut out the part by my knee and put in a few leather straps so that those straps are the only things holding up the bottom part of my pants. That's my entire costume for everything except the last two scenes when I become more sinister and dawn a black opera cape. For my makeup it's black paint in two triangles facing down around my eyes and a black painted on smile sort of like the Joker's.


Here's a picture:

How great is that?! I absolutely love everything about my costume and I'm more excited for this show than I have been for anything else.

Come see the show this weekend, buy tickets here!
https://tickets.imaginationstage.org/public/show_events_list.asp?shcode=427

"Indoor Track"

This week I'll be talking very briefly about winter track, which most people refer to as "Indoor Track". I went into track thinking that we'd be running in the school and going to the weightroom but no, we run outside every day. It's still fun and not too hard but I was surprised that it was outside. There was a scrimmage yesterday at the PG Sports and Learning Complex with every school in Montgomery County. I ran the 55m but didn't do as well as I would have liked. I ran an 8.63s time which the people on my team said was good for my very first race but while I was running I knew I wasn't going my fastest. It was probably because I was really nervous and my legs got pretty tight right before I ran. But I'll keep practicing and next time hopefully I'll be better. I'm aslo learning how to long jump which is really fun. Any kind of jumping I think is the funnest thing to do so hopefully I'll be able to do that in one of the meets.

Capture the Fall

This is my "Capture the Fall" video called "Rainy Days". I went out during Hurricane Sandy because my neighborhood looked very autumnal and pretty. I also took a few shots of what my family did that day which was bake cookies and carve a pumpkin, both are very fall-like things. I upped the saturation on the video a bit to make the colors look brighter and used a cross disolve between shots which kind of took away some time but I thought it looked nice.

Abstract Designs

Hello all! This week I have decided to write about the little designs that I draw all over my school papers. I started doing this last year around May and found that it's a good way for me to release extra energy and actually stay focused on what's happening in class. All of last year and even throughout the first few weeks this year I would ALWAYS do symmetrical designs. It messed with me if everything didn't perfectly match what was on the other side. I've noticed, however, that starting in like late September I've only been drawing asymmetrical things and that when I try to draw symmetrical things they bore me.

I find this ridiculously interesting (especially since I want to be a neuroscientist) and I really want to know what switch was turned on or off in my brain that made me like these abstract designs more than my previous symmetrical designs, and why now? I've thought a lot about it and about what was happening in my life in September but really the only thing that I can think of is starting 10th grade. I'm taking chemistry and precalculus this year and I have a very loose hypothesis that maybe all of the math involved in those subjects combined with the math aspect of the symmetry kind of overloaded my brain and was too much math. Because of this I think that I have started to draw very abstract pictures with some geometrical aspect to them occasionally. Here are some of the designs I've done.

Here are two of the very first designs I did


This is one that I did during health class over the summer


I did this during the debates in CAP


NSL class


I even drew on my hands and painted my nails with these designs.


Finally, this is my precalculus folder that I drew on.

Pippin

During the summer after 7th grade I auditioned for the Musical Theater Conservatory at Imagination Stage and was accepted. It started in the fall of 8th grade and we have had classes all that year and all of 9th grade (excluding summer and a short winter break every year) on Monday evenings. The way the program works is for two years we receive instruction and technique for acting and singing with a short sharing at the end of every semester to give parents the opportunity to see what we had learned. I've been with the same group of 15 people for the past four years (although we lost one girl after the first year) and we've all become a close-knit group of people. *For CAP teachers, Zoe J is also in this program with me and Christina is in the freshman class of the program starting this year.

This fall, which is our last semester, we leave the teacher's we've been working with for the past two years and are put in the hands of a professional D.C. director to put on a musical, in our case they have chosen Pippin.

Pippin has three main characters. There's Pippin, a young man looking for total fulfilment in life, who is played by the only boy in our conservatory, Rees. There's also Catherine, the love interest, who is played by Gillian. Finally there is the Leading Player who kind of represents a Hades type character who wants Pippin to essentially sell his soul and join the Leading Player's troupe of actors (all of them are secretly the characters in Pippin's life) in return for a short but spectacular life. This character is played by yours truly. I was really excited to get this role because it's a very fun role and I get a lot of freedom with it. There are five other supporting roles in the play and seven ensemble members. Pippin is a really complicated play once you look deeper than the surface because it's not just about his life (the Leading Player controls everyone in the play but Pippin and tries to drag him into the troupe as well) and that's a hard message to convey to the audience, but I have a lot of confidence in our group.

We have the privelege to work in a field of highly experienced professionals who will just make the play even better. Our director is Jay Brock who is a highly respected director throughout the country. We have a great musical director (Andrew), choreographer (Allison), and stage manager (Megan). On top of those four fantastic people we have behind the scenes people who are creating our costumes and set from scratch. At Imagination Stage we'll be in the smaller theater, the Reeve, but there are still high quality lighting and sound equipment although we'll be having live people play our music.

Overall, it's a really exciting experience and I'm very grateful to have the opportunity to A. Learn from a professional singer and a professional actor for two years, B. Get so close to such an amazing group of people and C. Work with this large number of professionals to create what will be a fantastic performance.

Everyone who can come out December 14th, 15th, and 16th at Imagination Stage to see us!!

Here's a video of Ben Vereen (Leading Player on Broadway) singing my favorite song of the show, Right Track, a duet with Pippin.

Cognitive Neuroscience

My past few blog posts have been on my goal to become an Olympic sprinter, but today I'm switching topics from my sports goal to my professional goal. For the longest time I've been convinced that I wanted to be a lawyer. I was going to go to UCLA and study psychology in undergrad then go to Stanford Law School after that. This past weekend, however, I watched three episodes of the show Morgan Freeman's Through the Wormhole on the science channel and I was sucked into the two episodes that had to do with the human brain. The first one was about the brain patterns of criminals and psychopaths and also the people who judge them. It talked a lot about the different parts of the brain and how a small change in one little section can cause someone to ignore the will to be good. They showed a study on the episode that proved people's will to be good started at an early age by doing a simple experiment on babies. The other episode, which was the most interesting one to me, was one about our subconscious. I was basically glued to the tv for the entire hour and I can't even describe how awesome it was.


Here's a link to the episode on YouTube.

I'm actually watching an episode now about eternity and next is the one on evil and then the one on the subconscious comes on. :) Anyway, this got me thinking and I decided that I'd really like to be a cognitive neuroscientist and study the mechanics of a brain and what makes people act the way they do. This website is something that I found that just provides a few recent studies and the overview of what they mean. I think this is a really good way to keep up with what's going on and to learn basic things about neuroscience. Another thing I found was just somebody's quizlet flashcards on high school level neuroscience vocabulary words. I thought that this was really interesting and that it would be cool just to check them out.

The last thing I have today is a summer program on cognitive neuroscience for high school students at Berkley University in California. I really want to enroll in this program because I would get fundamental information on the subject.

Here's a picture of some neurons.

Usain Bolt

In my last blog post I wrote about wanting to become an Olympic sprinter, which is still true. I'm joining indoor track at Blair and our season starts in mid November! I'm really excited for that and to see how I am at the 100m. I might try the 55m or the 200m but the 55m just seems to short and I'm worried about my knee (which has next to no cartilage in the left one) running around the curve of the 200m. But I digress.

This post is really just supposed to be about the fastest man in the world; Usain Bolt. He's one of my idols because he hasn't been running the 100m for that long in the track world and he's already set tons of records. He was originally running the 200m and 400m because his coaches thought that he was more of a long distance sprinter, but he wanted to run the 100m. Once he broke the Jamaican national record for the... I can't remember if it was the 200m or the 400m but he broke that record and his coaches let him start running the 100m, and look at where he is now!!

I admire his (and all the other sprinters') hard work and perserverence and his total commitment to the sport. I really want to get that feeling about an activity where I love it so much that I don't mind doing it for several hours every day.

Usain bolt is 26 years old in case anyone was wondering, and he's really tall for a sprinter; 6'5" and the first time he won a medal for the 100m by himself was in the 2009 World Championships in Beijing and he got gold! He only got his first 100m medal three years ago and he's already set the world and Olympic records. Just the fact that he's been doing that event for such a short time with so much success is really motivating to me and makes me think that in four years I'll be good enough to make it to the Olympics, even if I don't make it past my heat. To get into the Olympics last time I checked the qualifying time was 11.24 seconds in a national or international competition. My issue will be finding a national competition to enter...

This post is pretty much over but I just want to point something funny out that I've noticed. Every time Usain Bolt runs a race as he approaches the finish line he looks behind him to see the other poeple. I'm pretty sure this isn't good and knocks off some of his time, if only a few hundredths of a second but still. I wouldn't recommend that. Even with his looking back at the end of a race he's still blown away the world record and the Olympic record so I guess it's not that much of an issue for him.



Usain Bolt looking behind him at the 2012 Summer Olympics

My New Aspriation

I've never really followed the Olympics until this past summer, where I was watching it every day. I was blown away by the sportsmanship shown throughout the different events and it made me realize that not everyone on that level is competitive to a point where they are rude to competitors. I was really impressed with the gymnastics but what really caught my attention was the track and field. I have never in my life had an interest in running except for occasionally sprinting but after watching the Olympic track events, especially the 100m and 200m it was like my entire attitude towards running changed. I'll describe it as being "bitten by the running bug" as some might say. I saw Usain Bolt dominate the 100m and the 200m for the second Olympics in a row and I was inspired beyond words. All of a sudden I decided that I would be like him and become an Olympic athlete. Luckily for me, track isn't a sport like gymnastics where you have to start at the age of 3 to have any chance at making the Olympics, a lot of track stars start in early high school or late middle school. I made the decision sometime last year to do winter track, but that was primarily because I just wanted to do a sport. Recently I've been really looking forward to doing winter track to gauge whether or not I could actually be good at the sport. If I find that I'm running the 100m in 15 seconds or the 200m in 32 or so, I probably don't have much of a chance of making it to the Olympics. My goal by the end of the winter track season is to be able to run the 100 in around 12.5 seconds if I can get the start right. Depending on where I am at the end of the season I'll most likely quit lacrosse and do track in the spring and hopefully I'll knock off another .2 seconds. I've been warned that in training for the 100m I'd have to do several longer distance runs but unlike before I look forward to doing them if it will improve my sprinting. Throughout the track season I will look up to people like Usain Bolt, Carmalita Jeter, Allyson Felix, and Sanya Richards-Ross to continue to motivate myself. I know this is far-fetched but I'd like to make it to the 2016 Olympics. I have no illusion that I'll get close to medaling, if I went I wouldn't even get to the semi-finals but just getting to Rio would be incredible. In the 2020 Olympics I'm definitely going to the finals.

Carmalita Jeter after winning the silver medal in the 100m at the 2012 Olympic Games

Dystopian Trailer Progress Assignment

For the dystopian trailer project I am the scriptwriter. I have just finished the script and all we need to do is figure out when to go and film. There are 10 scenes in our trailer and each scene has multiple shots. The trailer will start out with a news report that we will film talking about artificial intelligence. We show that report one more time later in the trailer. We have a variety of shots from the front and back, establishing shots, medium shots, and close-ups and we also use both dialogue from the scene and several voice-overs. We are using the dance edit of the song Like a Criminal by District 78 to undertone almost the entire trailer. It's a techno song that represents the cold life that the people live being controlled by cell phones. When we have shots of the buildings we are likely going to put our propaganda poster on a few to demonstrate the propaganda aspect of life.

The story that is to be told through our trailer is that in a world where the iPhone 27 has gotten so advanced people don't think for themselves, they are practically zombies. The main character has a best friend which is uncommon in this society and one day the best friend suddenly vanishes. When the main character asks her phone where her friend is, the phone shows no recognition of the friend ever existing. That part is similar to people being "vaporized" in 1984. We then show the main character sneaking into a guarded library and finding a book that tells her who invented these cell phones. While we never show her actually obtaining a police uniform and traveling back in time, we show her in a police uniform running through crowds of people nothing like the ones previously shown in the trailer with a voice-over briefly explaining it. Through a few different shots the audience sees her go up to the person who invented the robots.

Our five dystopian characteristics are restricted thought (machines trying to get the main character to stop thinking about her best friend), figurehead or concept is worshipped (people think cell phones are making their life perfect), constant surveillance (a cell phone tells one of the police about a specific citizen and has the police go back in time and destroy them), dehumanized state (people walking around zombie-like), and the illusion of a perfect utopia (people think the phones are helping them).

5x5 Video Project

1. Driving to the golf course
2. Video of a green
3. My golf bag
4. Geese on the course
5. Someone's put

For this project I just used my iPhone and edited it with iMovie and it ran very smoothly. I didn't run into any problems while editing this project and I'm pleased with how it turned out.

I think that for our next independent video project we could get into groups and maybe make a short documentary about something that we're interested in. It would only have to be about 10 minutes long and wouldn't have to be very complicated.

Dystopian Trailer Assignment

Equilibrium. Kurt Wimmer. R. 2002
In the near future everyone's actions and emotions are rigidly controlled by the Cleric, and the highest ranking Cleric (Christian Bale) soon discovers that the government he's working for is not so great when they arrest his wife. He joins the resistance and plots to overthrow the government, while still being employed as a Cleric.

This trailer does an excellent job showing the different aspects of a dystopian society using a combination of words and clips from the movie. There is a good ratio of words to film and enhances the audience's understanding of the plot. There are voice-overs in the beginning explaining who the main character is as he bursts through a door surrounded by gunshots. This is a better way to effectively show who the main character is instead of just having text or just having film. The editing creates a basic plot of the movie but doesn't give the resolution, making the audience want to know how it ends. I would like to implement the editing techniques of voice-overs and text throughout my trailer to convey the characters and plot. I also want to have a few establishing shots mixed in to show the lack of freedom in the society.

Personalized Learning Article Reflection

For this assignment I read the article "Preparing Students to Learn Without Us" by Will Richardson. It wa about the new concept of personalized learning for students. Personalized learning/personal learning is basically where a student creates their own ways of finding out information while still meeting state standards. Students in a few high schools with this program create their own lessons and how they are going to learn and present the information. This allows the student to learn about something that really speaks to them and so they're more interested in it. "Through these activities, the student aligned her work to the standards she chose." is an important quote from this article because it summarizes the whoe idea of personalized learning.

I was surprised that this concept has been introduced to several schools around the country so quickly. I think that personalized learning is a great idea and that it could be an easy thing to do in this class. We could all choose something about filmmaking that we find interesting and then go off on our own to find ways to learn and reflect what we've discovered. It would give us all an opportunity to learn what we wanted which would definitely make at least me more interested in school. I would definitely like to learn more about both the editing and the actual filming aspects of making a film. Instead of spending a few classes each on scriptwriting, filming, directing, and editing, this would give me a chance to have more time to learn about the things that I really care about.

Here's a link to my annotated article

Movie Review Assignment

I read a review of The Dark Knight Rises by Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. He starts out talking about the previous Batman movies and then gives a basic summary of what's going on at the beginning of the movie. He provides the background for this movie by referencing the previous ones. He then starts to get into more specifics of the acting and talks about Christian Bale and how Anne Hathaway's character got Batman "out of his shell and back into his batsuit." Next he talks about the villain, Bane, and how even though the character wears a mask throughout the film, the actor does an excellent job with his voice. Following that there's a short paragraph about the "visual pow" of the film where he mentions that IMAX cameras were used for a majority of the shots. Then he mentions the characters that have a bit less focus and their part in the movie. He sums up the review with a few sentences expressing how good he thought the movie was.

I think for our quarterly movie review we should be given a good amount of freedom. There should be basic guidelines, but for the most part I think we should be able to structure it the way we want to. A list of what we need to put into our reviews (key points and such) would be helpful and then we could show those key points in several different forms. Another idea would be to not always have a written review. One quarter we could get into groups and create a type of news report that would review the movie, that way it would continue to be interesting.

Here's the movie review I annotated.

First Blog Post Assignment

My name is Cherie and this is my first blog. I am in CAP 10 at Blair and we are creating blogs for film class. I would like to go to South Africa and watch great white sharks leap out of the water when they eat. I'm interested in the editing part of filmmaking where you put everything together on the computer. Last year I really liked the infoflow opens and the news shows. For the infoflow show open my group filmed several shots of people dancing and making the letters that spell "infoflow" with their bodies and put it to music. For the news show another person and I filmed the interviews and edited it all together. Then I was the switcher when we recorded the show. We could use our blogs to talk about our change projects across the different groups and to discuss ideas and opinions for different assignments.

Image Source: Great White