Now that you’re three weeks (halfway) into your senior project experience, are you answering your essential question? 

 

1. How are you exploring your essential question; is it different from what you expected? If you don’t feel like you’re answering your essential question, what is happening that’s different from what you expected? 

So far I don’t think that I can fully say that I have answered my essential question because a large amount of work still remains. I believe that my essential question will be best answered when I actually start putting the footage that I have together. While filming I tried to capture as much of the experience as possible so that I can relay that to the viewers of my documentary. However, I was not able to capture everything so there are limits to how well the viewers will be able to understand this lifestyle without having actually been there with me. Despite this, I can say that I am happy with how things are coming together so far and this is somewhat following the path that I expected. 

 

1. Are you surprised by any of the challenges that you’ve faced so far? How have you met those challenges and what can you do going forward to deal with them?

 

As I mentioned in my 2nd Critical Reflection I have encountered a number of large challenges so far. The main one being an issue with the audio in the clips that I already captured. The main issue is that I did not account for the fact that wind might obstruct the audio and so in most of the footage you can hear the constant sound of the wind. However, after sorting through my footage this week I realized that because I didn’t film my uncle speaking about his operation in the car (another challenge that I faced) most of the clips don’t have much useful audio in them anyway. Since I am following my uncle around for his daily routine there is not a lot of speaking in a decent amount of the clips because he isn’t talking while feeding the cattle. That aside, audio is still an issue for me since I need to have my uncle talking about his operation in order to stitch the clips together in a meaningful manner and tell a story. However, as I also mentioned in my 2nd Critical Reflection the way that I am going to solve this problem is to have my uncle sit down and answer a set of questions that pertain to the clips that I have and the story that I want to tell. This way I will still be able to have my uncle sharing the necessary information while not having an issue with background noise. Going forward since I will be filming more I think that I am going to stick with the method of just assuming that all of the clips will be muted at the end of the day. I think that this is the best course of action since I don’t have control over the weather and getting a microphone at this point is not feasible. 

 

1. Writing on your essential question: What have you learned about your essential question so far? What further questions do you have? and/or Has your essential question changed? If so, how?  What do you want to know more about?

So far I have been able to fully immerse myself in this lifestyle that I am trying to portray through film. Staying at the ranch has already helped me to better understand the kind of story that I want to tell with my documentary and think about the more specific aspects of this business/lifestyle that I want to capture. However, I now also realize that it would be near impossible to replicate the experience that I have had so far for the viewers of my film. While I hope to inform them about this lifestyle there is so much that I now see that can not be captured by the cameras. While I intend to try my best I have come to realize that there will always be parts of the experience that will be left out of the documentary. With this in mind, I think that my essential question will be more difficult to answer than I initially expected.