Metacognition: 

• What have you discovered about your process, your habits?
• Now, what do you know you don’t know? Circle back to your essential question. 

Post your reflection to the blog in advance of your cohort meeting.

Since a big part of my process up until this point has been filming and this was the part that was the most unpredictable I will talk about what I have discovered about the filming process. The first thing that I discovered that I might have overlooked in the conception of my project was the time commitment required when filming. During the filming process, I had to constantly wake up early because ranch life starts much sooner than I anticipated. I also soon realized that while I assumed much of what goes on every day is similar there are many daily chores that go into ranching. Every day during the filming process I decided to maintain the same schedule as my uncle and follow him every morning as he fed and checked all of the cows. Even though after a few days I probably got enough footage of this I came into this project intending to understand what everyday ranch life was like so I decided to follow through on that intention. 

Another major thing that I discovered about this process was just how much time is spent in the car when ranching. Everyday hours were spent in the car going in and out, loading and unloading, and traveling from one place to another. While I wanted to show my viewers what ranching is really like time spent in the car is not part of what I captured. This was mainly for a number of reasons but most prominently because of the poor audio quality. However, I also doubt that this would make for a very interesting viewing experience if I had hours of time spent in the car in my film. On a related note I also soon realized that because I was not filming all of the time (meaning I was not filming all of the time spent in the car) each day I did not have an amount of footage that truly reflects how busy the day was. While I don’t see this as being a problem with the final product I did look at my footage some days and wonder how we spent so long doing only a few things.