The Proposal

Hello! My name is Ariel and I’ll be working on Project 3 individually. For this assignment, I will be focusing on Project 2 to reimagine for a new medium. I will specifically focus on the Black Panther Party and FBI disturbance. This would be showing key moments in the Black Panthers Party era that were hugely impacted by the FBI: Including but not limited to inner-party informants, raiding of headquarters, and the death of Fred Hampton. The modalities that I will be utilizing will be a “mashup”, including voice overs (small clips of podcasts), clips of interviews, images, snips of newspapers, and my own personal creative videos to help capture the story. It is still under revision but it will follow a basic format like:

Hook (Starting scene that will tie back to the BPP) -> Intro of BPP (No more than a few minutes of a brief but educational introduction)-> Major Issues (What Stopped the BPP from being successful?)-> Introducing The FBI (Official Papers)-> Evidence (Video clips, news papers, interviews) + credits at the end

I anticipate that while I conduct this assignment, the usage recreating a previous assignment of the BPP will not only show a deeper understanding of the party but also a way to better grasp the attention of viewers that an essay based paper can’t do. In doing this, rather than just seeming to be gathering information of the BPP, I will actually spreading awareness about the group and how we see it today, which changes completely the message despite me trying to achieve that in Project 1. Not to mention, Project 1 was based on just having one readership, but now, the intended audience will be “publication”, which changes the message because now you have to expand to satisfy as much people as you can. Because I will be doing my own touch for this project to be different from just an essay, I have to stop thinking in the mindset of a documentary or a reporter. I have to think like I’m talking with someone who has no idea what I’m talking about, but that I’m trying to convince into paying attention to this issues without seeming like a “Believe in this conspiracy!” kind of person.

Since I am not very talented in the video editing department, I do anticipate some challenge in trying to find my way around making a video that makes sense and that works the way I want, because it is completely different to think about how I want a video to look vs how it turns out to be. In addition, I want my project to look high end, so I have to prepare high quality evidence that is credited and that is simple to digest, which can be hard for me because I like to include a lot of information. My primary reason for making the choices I will make in terms of medium and prior work to reimagine is because I want to entrain my viewers, I don’t want to make a project that will be seen as boring to my teacher or my classmates, so I definitely want to do something that will be worth my time and theirs. And in doing that, that means trying to stay away from just putting out information everyone knows and rather, make it seem like a entertaining story.