tarynnhs11′s Blog

With our film, we wanted to inform, persuade, and effect change. We had a lot of good information, and we used a lot of statistics to inform our audiences. We had information that was accurate, and was proven by experts. For example, 100 cows die every day in India because of plastic bags that are left lying around. Or that each American household uses approximately 350 gallons of water a day, and 25%of it ends up being wasted in our toilets. We also persuaded well. We found out in our interviews that a lot of people do actually care about the environment, and a lot of them don’t understand why people just don’t even try. In one of our expert interviews, Tara Fridhandler said that recycling is so easy, and if we started putting recycling bins all over, as much as we do with trashcans, she thinks that people will realize that it doesn’t take very much effort. I think that people will appreciate the fact that our class took so much time and effort to try and make a difference in the world. Our goal was to try and make a change.

I think some of the things that work in this film are that we had updated information, we had experts give their opinions on the subject, and we made it interesting with music, still images, and the visual metaphors. We made it fun and easy to watch, and I think that will help a lot with getting people to listen, and think about how they can help the environment. We also did a good job with the editing and using the interviews correctly. We cited everything appropriately, and had good credits at the end. I liked how the interviews flowed together and made sense. For example, when we wrote the question and then just showed the interviewee’s answer

Some of the things that would work better in the film are getting steadier camera shots. The camera shots were good for the most part, but a lot of parts were shaky and used the wrong technique at the wrong time. For example, when one of the groups was doing an expert interview, they did a close up when, in my opinion, it was unnecessary. Another time was when doing the street interviews, they gave the interviewee too much headroom, and you could only see them from the chin up. The narration and timing was another thing we could work on. In one scene, we were showing a quote, and the narrator was reading the quote, but the timing was way off and the talking cut into another scene in the background of an interview. Lighting is another thing we could work on. At Creve Coeur Lake, there were some interviews that had very poor lighting, and you couldn’t even see their faces. One more thing we could have done better is using still images that didn’t have the name of the website we got it from on the bottom of the photo. There are plenty of pictures on the internet to choose from and it would have looked more professional if we removed those, or got better images. The intro was very bad, in my opinion. I think we should have taken more time on it, and more people should have participated in it.

I learned many things in this project. I learned more about sustainable living in this class than I have in science class. I learned about different camera shots and when to use them, I liked the videos we watched about student documentaries. I think that really helped us. I learned many ways to research things, and all the different types of search engines there are. I have blogged before, but nothing like this. This project helped me a lot with working well with others and organizing things well. I learned so much about sustainable living, and I will definitely start recycling and caring more about the way we live. I also learned how to cut and edit video, and use the Premier software.

I think I will use these lessons in the future. I understand now how important it is to care about the environment. Hopefully others that see our film will feel the same way that I do. I’m not going to care just because someone tells me to or just because I can. I’m going to care because I need to. If we are going keep living on the Earth then we need to start somewhere in protecting it. I will use all of the lessons we have learned in the future.

This is an article I found about how quickly we need to act on the climate crisis.

“The global climate crisis is the greatest crisis the world has ever faced, and we’re under unbelievable time pressure”, says professor Charles Derber, of Boston College. Derber says that we are on the right track thanks to Obama, who is really focused on the environment. He thinks that we are on the brink of the end of the world, and we need to make changes now. Derber says that other countries like China put out much more carbon emissions than the US, and this is our time to be the leader and show them the way.

This is an interview that I found called “What happens when the oil runs out?”

We use oil as an every day product, we eat oil, we wear oil, we indulge ourselves with oil, and it is rapidly running out as a cheap form of energy. If oil runs out, we don’t have food security, energy security, medicine security or consumer goods security. “Every time we fill our car tanks, we use the equivalent of five years of human manual labour.”  It’s not that we are running out of oil, but we are running out of the oil that is easy to get, the cheap stuff. The more valuable oil is extremly hard to get at. One other form of fuel we could use is coal, but only if we didn’t care about increasing our carbon emissions by 40%. “I don’t think there is any way of avoiding the fact that we have to use less energy and the issue is not how do we keep everything going, but how do we change what we want and change how we live?”, says Rob hopkins.

This article is from the New York Times newspaper. It talks about why people don’t do very much to help the environment. Here are some points I found interesting.

• In a survey, Americans ranked climate change the least important thing in a list of the most important priorities to be dealt with.
• People tend to focus more on what is unknown(How much are the oceans rising?), than what is known and is more important(The oceans ARE rising, do something about it).
• A big debate is whether we shoul pay for what is proven and what we know will work(like wind turbines) or put our money toward something that could be invented sometime in the near future.
• Most americans think that we won’t have climate problems for a long time.
• It is a fact that we participate better in groups, and if that is so, then if we worked together, I think we could really make a difference.
• Putting people in groups can increase participation up to 75%

The human brain tends to procrastinate sometimes. We think it will be a big problem several years from now, and we can solve it later.

We watched a video in class by Matthew Needleman called Film school for Pod casters. One thing I learned was to use the rule of thirds, as it can make the person/place/thing you are filming more interesting. Another thing I learned is that instead of writing down words on a piece of paper that tells you what to do, the best way to make a storyboard is by drawing pictures of exactly how you want it to be.

This is a newspaper editorial called “We Need a Global Carbon Tax” by Ralph Nader and Toby Heaps.

Summary:
Al Gore proposed a CO2 tax to perhaps lower the carbon emissions into our ozone. People will cut back if there is a tax on something, especially if you do it a lot. The Most efficient way to apply a carbon tax is at a relatively small number of major carbon bottlenecks. It will cost $1.375 trillion per year to fight back against climate change. They key products that have the most concentrated carbon are trunk pipelines for gas, refineries for oil, railroad heads for coal, liquid natural gas terminals, cement, steel, aluminum, and greenhouse gas intensive chemical plants. A global carbon tax can be monitored by satellites. Some countries, such as China and India feel that it is not necessary to tax carbon emissions, because one way to do this is to buy carbon credits, and they would become scarce after a while. Another reason is admininstering  billions of carbon credits would could cause a civil war between groups that want large amounts of carbon credits. The final reason is that China reads our newspapers and when they see that we are worrying too much about our environment, they might take it the wrong way.

Response:
I don’t understand why countries like China and India are not wanting to organize a carbon tax. in my opinion, it is very smart, even though we will run out of them quickly, I think it will be good for our economy. If there was a carbon tax, the government might lower taxes on everything else since carbon taxes need to be so high,

This article, called The Environmental Load of 300 Million: How Heavy?, By Brad Knickerbocker, was an article I found when researching for my topic, Why should we care about living sustainably?
These are my notes.

 There are going to be 300 million people living in the united states very soon, and we don’t know what it will do for our environment. We are worried that environmental problems will only get worse since they were pushed aside and forgotten so many years ago. The average americans “ecological footprint”- the amount of water and land needed to support an individual, is about 24 acres. In the long term, The US will sustain less than half of the nation’s current population. The United States is the only industrialized nation experiencing significant population growth. And with more people, we consume more. Nearly 3000 acres of farmland is destroyed daily for non agricultural use. I think that at the rate we are at, we are going to run out of room.

This is a magazine article called “Why Gasoline Is Still King” by Ralph Kinney Bennett.

 Summary:
Even though gasoline induces pollution, we still need it to run our vehicles. “No other fuel delivers so much energy in such a small package with such flexibility, utility, safety, and simplicity.” We consume approximately 390 million gallons of gasoline a day, and 80% of each gallon is wasted as heat and exhaust. Whenever gasoline powered cars and electric cars are compared, gasoline always wins because of it’s speed, flexibility of operation, and range.  The Tesla electric roadster is an expensive electric car that has about 6,831 interconnected lithium-ion batteries powering it. It has a high mile range, bit that all depends on how you drive it. If you drive it like a sports car(which it is), it will have a significantly lower mile range. And again, when compared to gasoline powered cars, the gas powered car can go for longer, stay at high speeds, and you can fill up the tank basically anywhere, whereas in electric cars, you’d have to go all the way back home and recharge it. Nothing can compare to gasoline, not even ethanol.  Ethanol only provides about 2/3 the amount of energy that a gasoline powered car can. No matter what the cost, we will always buy gasoline because we think we need it. If we want to go somewhere like the mall or the movies, we would always drive to get there. We will develop more efficient uses of gasoline so we can use less, and burn it more cleanly.

Response:
 I think that gas powered cars are better when compared to electric cars and ethanol powered cars, because we’ve had them for so long and we keep bettering them every day, so hopefully soon we will be burning fuel efficiently and wasting less oil. Also, gasoline powered cars get you where you need to be, and fast. Electric cars can too, but they are their fastest in the first couple of minutes after leaving your house. They are extremely expensive too, if they lower the price down to the price of any average gas powered car today, I think people will choose the gasoline powered car first, because electric cars are too much of a hassle.

Preparing for street interviews.

• Don’t chew gum.
• Tell them that you are a high school student and tell them what you are doing.
• Don’t get the microphone in the shot.
• Check your camera supplies, make sure you have eveything, camera is charged.
• Get your questions ready before hand.

Conducting an interview:

• Don’t be afraid to ask people. You never know who will say yes just by looking at them.
• Practice how to ask someone, because you may only have one chance to get their attention before they walk away.
• Keep them talking, complement them on some of their answers.
• Remember that you are trying to get their opinion, not stating yours.

My ideas:

• Don’t pick a side, them them get their opinion out.
• Think of a smart opening line to keep them interested so they won’t walk away.
• Ask everyone.
• Get your questions ready before hand, don’t just go out there empty handed.

These are 20 questions to interview people with:

1. What is your definition of sustainable living?
2. Do you think we can make an impact on the earth?
3. In what ways do you think the human race will be affected if we continue being so wasteful?
4. Why do you think we let our environment get this bad?
5. How can we get the world involved with this?
6. Do you think it will be hard to get this message across?
7. How should we convince our kids to live sustainably?
8. Would you recommend adding a required class in school about sustainability?
9. Why do you think not very many people care about this subject?
10. What do you think will happen when the world fills up with waste and there is no where else to put it?
11. Do you think living sustainably will cost more or less?
12. What do you think about eliminating cars or public transportation? Could it be done?
13. What do you think will happen if we run out of oil? What else could we use?
14. What are your thoughts about having everyone ride bicycles instead of using cars? Or walking?
15. Do you think that the earth would have been better off without us humans?
16. Do you think it is possible for the world to be “green”?
17. Do you think other, less developed countries are aware of our declining resources?
18.  Do you think we are responsible for all of this damage on the earth?
19. Are you okay with our current lifestyle? Or do you want to change it?
20. Do you think we should do anything at all? Or just let nature run it’s course?