ENTREE #9

http://www.youtube.com/IraqDocumentary

On this site you will soon be able to view our documentary in its entirety as well as some other clips not included in the documentary.

Project Introduction

The Iraq War: A Student Perspective was created off three students interest and curiosity about what students think of the war and whether it affects us.  We personally wanted to interview a vast array of different and diverse students that come from all backgrounds.  We took our journalism and multimedia knowledge and decided to do a group documentary, which could capture the thoughts of many students on film. Once we decided on our multimedia format and topic, we then came up with questions to ask all 67 students. With Nick’s occupation in the National Guard we were able to get quality interviews from soldiers themselves that served in Iraq, which helped to provide insight to see what it was really like being in Iraq.  We also interviewed Megan, a student who has grown up in a military family and is marrying Derrick an ROTC cadet and a student that will be deployed when he graduates.  These three students, Nick, Devin and Jenna tried to maintain the professional journalism stance by creating a non-biased documentary telling the stories and opinions of many students.  We hope that we touched the lives of the New Media Communications 301 spring term class.  We personally learned a lot from this documentary and we hope that you all do to. Now lets take a look into the lives of the three creative, new media students.
Nick Conley is in his fifth and final year of college. He started his college career at New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, NM where he played baseball and earned his commission as an officer in the United States Army. After graduating with an Associates of Arts degree.  He then moved back home to Oregon and attended Linfield College for a year. Conley transferred to Oregon State University where he has spent the past two years and will graduate with a Bachelors Degree in Liberal Studies with a focus in New Media Communication. For the past three years he has been a member in the Oregon Army National Guard where he is now a First Lieutenant. After Graduation Nick plans on going to courses for the military and by May of next year he is scheduled to be deployed to Iraq with the Oregon Army National Guard 41st Brigade. Conley brought his knowledge of the Army and his film skills to the project.  It was his stimulating questions to soldiers that brought the soldier prospective to the project.
Devin Robinson studied film for two years after high school before becoming jaded with the Hollywood system and the LA way of life.  Robinson did some traveling in Europe, returned to Oregon and became a waiter.  After a few months of that he decided it was time to go back to school.  Now he is in his senior year and studying New Media Communications at Oregon State. Robinson was enticed into this war documentary project because of the age similarity between the common college student and the common US soldier and what they thought of each other. Film and video are his favorite mediums and he was happy to bring his  technical and aesthetic knowledge to the project. He was the creative, master producer where his film skills shined like the Hollywood red carpet.
Jenna Santelli is graduating from Oregon State in a week and half with her study in New Media Communications.  She is going to be moving to Utah in a month to start her journey working at Salt Lake Community College in the Sports Information Department where she will continue her passion for writing sports. Santelli’s dream is to become a travel writer and travel world one article at a time. She has been to Thailand where she volunteered and kept an active blog. She also studied Spanish in Costa Rica. Santelli submitted her resume and this project to a National Geographic Correspondence Program that would help jump start her travel writing career.

Questionnaire Totals

1. Questions:

    

   Age: 23, 21, 20, 22, 22, 23, 23, 22, 23, 23, 22, 21, 21, 23, 56, 21, 20, 20, 23, 25, 22, 22, 22, 20, 24, 19, 21, 43, 25, 21, 21, 25, 24, 19, 19, 20, 22, 19, 23, 21, 22, 26, 19, 19, 20, 19, 22, 21, 23, 20, 30, 20, 21, 21, 24, 21, 21, 21, 23, 49, 24, 20, 22, 21,

    

   Avg. age: 23.0

    

   1. Know anyone?
      1. Y: 33   48.5%
      2. N: 33   48.5%
      3. Age: 22, 19, 20,22, 26, 41, 25, 24, 18, 24, 22, 25, 22, 23, 24, 21, 29, 23, 50, 25, 23, 24, 26, 22, 21, 23, 25, 26, 23, 24, 20, 23, 30, 21, 22, 25, 21,
      4. Avg age: 24.7
      5. Died: 2   3%

    

   1. Scale 1-10 how important – 9, 3, 8, 5, 4, 8, 1, 8, 8, 5, 9, 10, 10, 7, 7, 8, 5, 8, 6, 7, 1, 2, 10, 8, 8, 6, 8, 7, 5, 7, 7.5, 10, 8, 10, 5, 8, 10, 2, 7, 8, 9, 4, 8, 8, 7, 8, 2, 3, 4, 7.5, 4, 7, 9, 7, 9, 9, 8, 10, 4, 5, 5, 7, 7, 8, 8, 8, 10
      1. AVG: 459/67 = 6.85

    

   1. Affect your vote?
      1. Y: 54   80.6%
      2. N: 12   17.9%
      3. u/k: 1   1.5%

    

   1. Affect your financial future?
      1. Y: 45   68%
      2. N: 19   28.8%
      3. u/k: 2   3%

    

   1. Why join?
      1. Financial: 44   42.7%
      2. Patriotism: 26   25.2%
      3. Family Tradition: 10   9.7%
      4. No other options: 10   9.7%
      5. Something Memorable: 6   5.8%
      6. Video game culture: 1   .97%
      7. Structure: 1   .97%
      8. Future: 5   4.9%

    

    MILITARY QUESTIONS:

    

   1. Age:
      1. 19: 1
      2. 20: 5
      3. 21:
      4. 22: 9
      5. 23: 7
      6. 24: 5
      7. 25: 3
      8. 26: 4
      9. 27: 3
      10. > 27: 6

    

   AVG Age: 23.86

    

   1. Rank:
      1. PVT: 4
      2. PFC: 5
      3. SPC: 18
      4. CPL:
      5. SGT: 7
      6. SSG: 4
      7. SFC:  4
      8. CDT: 4

    

   1. Enrolled in college?
      1. Y: 25   58.1%
      2. N: 18   41.9%

    

   1. Has the army helped or hindered you going to school?
      1. Helped: 17   45.9%
      2. Hindered: 7   18.9%
      3. Both: 13   35.1%

    

   1. Do you feel college students properly recognize the military?
      1. Y: 14   37.8%
      2. N: 23   62.2%
      3. Pos: 6
      4. Neg: 3
      5. Both: 7

    

   1. Have you been deployed?
      1. Y: 19   44.2%
      2. N: 24   55.8%

    

   1. Do you feel you know why we are fighting?
      1. Y: 36   87.8%
      2. N: 5   12.2%

    

   1. Reason for joining
      1. Financial: 21   20.6%
      2. Service: 33   32.3%
      3. Education: 28   27.5%
      4. Family: 15   14.7%
      5. Nothing better: 5   4.9%

ENTREE #8

Hi again, the day has arrived and tonight we will show our video. We worked for several hours yesterday editing and putting in stats and other info in the video. We met in Hovland Computer lab and watched the rough edit, which was about 17 minutes long, then we used that and added an took away a couple clips. We put in all the text we needed to convey the message we were trying to send and also put in some background music in parts. We only have a couple of small things to do today to get ready. Last night all the people who were in our video should have gotten e-mailed to invite them to the showing of our video tonight at 6:00 pm. We are also writing our biographies and introduction to our project today. To make last minute edits to our video and to fine tune a couple things, we will be meeting in Hovland again today at around noon. I am really excited to see people’s reaction to the video. I will be putting on a link to you tube where we will post the video in the near future.

 

ENTREE #7

Our group exchanged some e-mails today updating each other on our progress over the weekend. We are planning on meeting tomorrow, Monday, to look at the rough film that Devin put together. I plan on doing some research to help our with our survey stats that we have. More to follow.

ENTREE #6

Still making progress. Our team met at the library on Thursday and passed out surveys to about 40 students. We also recruited 5-6 students to be on camera and answer our survey questions. We are almost set for our video now. The only thing really left to do is the long and tedious editing.

Friday, was another productive day in the war group. We met in Hoveland Computer Lab to start our editing process. We are still trying to get a feel for the flow of the documentary and how to use the great footage we collected. I finished putting together all the survey answers and got the totals from the students and from all the military people we gave them to. The totals we’re both surprising and predictable. We are probably going to use the survey answers as text in the video to show what students really think.

Only four more days and I think we will be more than ready to show a great film.

ENTREE #5

Well our group met tonight and we a still just cruising along. I heard that the interview that Devin and Jenna did last Thursday went well and we now have just about enough footage to make an outstanding documentary. We are still planning on doing some random interviews with students in the OSU quad and we made arrangements to meet this Thursday to do that. Other than that we are waiting to get server space on the OSU server that way we can save all our editing and we all can have access to it. Until next time…

ENTREE #4

After a long weekend without a computer I thought I would just check in and let everyone know what is going on. After our interviews late last week I took off for Lake Billy Chinook and was without work for a couple of days. So what I am now working on is getting some questionnaire information compiled so that we can use it in our documentary. At class tonight I’m sure our group will meet and we can all get caught up with everyone’s latest developments. 

ENTREE #3 / 21 May

Last night our group went to the democratic parties nomination celebration and the Obama headquarters in downtown Corvallis. We ended up getting interviews with 3 different students and got their comments on their views on the war and how they feel students are effected by it. We even were lucky enough to get an interview with the OSU democratic leader. We ended up doing the interviews outside and I think the worked out well. We got wireless mics and I think that helped keep surrounding sounds out and concentrate on the voice of the interviewee. Here are some clips of the shots we got.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD-2093B_iI&eurl=http://devinarobinson.wordpress.com/about/

 

Today I scheduled a more formal interview with one of the best soldiers the Oregon Army National Guard has to offer. I chose to interview him because first of all he is a student at OSU, secondly because he is in the military and has been to Iraq, and finally because of his achievements he is a spokesman for the Oregon Army National Guard. Devin and I got together and picked up a lighting kit at the library and we had the wireless mic from the day before. Devin also brought his tripod, which will help in the quality of the video. We did have to wait outside the the house of the soldier for about 15 minutes for him to get home, but once he did he let us in and we began to set up. He helped us out by clearing out a good place for him to sit down in his living room. He even cleaned the wall that was going to be in the background. Devin set up his camera while I took care of the lights and the mic and in about 15 min we were ready to shoot. The interview went well, he seemed like he had alot of experience in talking about these issues. We had him talk about his time in Iraq, his jobs, how the military has effected him, how the military has helped him with school, along with many other things. I really feel like we will use alot of what he said and I appreciate all his help. So we are well on our way but I am very optimistic. 

ENTREE #2

This past weekend I went to drill and didn’t have alot of time to work on any homework. One thing that I was able to do was make a questionnaire and have soldiers fill it out. I was able to get about 50 guys to fill out the questionnaire, and I tried to keep it restricted to soldiers ages 18-25 and anyone who is enrolled in school. In just glancing over the answers I feel like there was a wide range of opinions. Today we have class again and our group will be meeting and figuring out our schedule for the next week. We will be shooting all of our interviews for our film and I believe our goal will be to have all shooting done by next week.