For my senior project, I plan on deepening my knowledge and understanding of film by watching a collection of movies and then writing about them in a reflective/personal essay each week. I plan on considering the following essential question: What does film tell us about pop culture and ourselves? Sub-questions include: What makes film a unique and singular medium for communication? How do we as spectators interact with film in comparison to other art forms? How has film evolved? How does film impact us and how do we impact film? And what does film mean to me?
For answering my essential question,  I know that well-rounded research is necessary. I plan to pull from all sources in order to get different perspectives, including movie reviews, interviewing people who have professionally critiqued movies, as well as watching movies with people in my life and getting their opinions.
I do have previous experience writing about film: last year in my Spanish class I kept a blog where I watched Academy Award winners of the Best Picture awards and then reviewed them. I also took the Personal Essay class last year, which made me realize that I want to explore my own voice as a writer and that I have a lot to say about the way I interpret things. But in my writing for my project, I want to be more thorough and detailed. For my weekly schedule, I plan on watching the five movies in the first three days of the week, splitting it up with two movies on Monday and Tuesday, and the last one on Wednesday. I also plan on writing down notes and doing research on each movie after I watch them. On Wednesday I plan on spending most of that day doing research and beginning to draft my essay. For Thursday and Friday, I will leave that time to write and meet with my mentor to discuss my writing, so that I will have my completed essay for that week done by the weekend. Anna Gonzales has agreed to be my mentor,  and since she is teaching a personal essay class this trimester, she has said that she is willing to allow me to participate in some of her classes. By looking at both my own reactions to the film as well as doing formal research on how these films were perceived at the time, I hope to answer my essential question of what film can tell us about us individually as well as pop culture. In order to have a successful project, I want to end the six weeks with a solid understanding of how different people interpret and understand movies. I also hope that at the end of this project I will have worked toward finding my voice as a writer. Although  I will have a collection of essays at the end of my senior project, I find that what is most important for me is that this will be a learning experience, so as long as I feel like I have learned something about myself and movies, I will have had a successful project.