In which I regale my story of what happens when teenagers are assigned a video project...
It honestly didn't occur to me (or others in my group, as we later found) that staging a Vietnam protest (yes, you read correctly, Vietnam) in a public place for our video project over the 1960's would earn us more than stares. In fact, the group of the six of us had three people approach us, none of which, thankfully, were negative or threatening.
And so we stood in the middle of a public square downtown, wearing 60's-esque clothing as best we could find and bearing signs reading "Give Peace a Chance" and "Make Love Not War", shouting phrases to that effect so as to record it on a camcorder for our project that's due in about a week. Meanwhile, bystanders stared (understandable) until we were approached by one woman and her little girl. The woman proceeded to tell us that she was so proud of us, and that more people in her generation should be out there protesting. One of my groupmates tried to give her a hint that we were not, in fact, protesting a modern war, and said something to the effect of "Yeah, Vietnam was bad," to which she replied "You mean Iraq," and continued to praise us until she walked away.
Not-so-similarly, after the second take a man approached us, informing us that if we tried to protest anything in China we would be killed and our organs would be sold for profit because of their harsh communist government, and he proceeded to give us handouts reading as much (including detailing exactly how much said body parts would be worth in such a situation). After some rather ill-placed remarks about Liberals to which I am not ashamed to say I took offense, he walked away, leaving the six of us to be satisfied with our footage and pack up.
Of course, because my project group included four teenage boys, anything on the 60's must include something having to do with the foundation of the fine institution of Taco Bell. So after one commercial filmed in public at such a location, we decided that we had reached our humiliation quota and moved to one groupmate's house. There we filmed such fine, award-worthy scenes as a reenactment of a historic boxing knockout, the JFK assassination (complete with a go-kart as the presidential motorcade) and our own trailer of "The Sound of Music", which was essentially four group members skipping around me as I played my guitar in the middle of a field (complete with goats), and then five of us skipping back and forth across said field.
It really was way too much fun for something that was originally supposed to be academic, and the entire class today was apparently informed as to the details of our exploits.
And we have at least one more day of filming left...details on that are sure to follow.
And so we stood in the middle of a public square downtown, wearing 60's-esque clothing as best we could find and bearing signs reading "Give Peace a Chance" and "Make Love Not War", shouting phrases to that effect so as to record it on a camcorder for our project that's due in about a week. Meanwhile, bystanders stared (understandable) until we were approached by one woman and her little girl. The woman proceeded to tell us that she was so proud of us, and that more people in her generation should be out there protesting. One of my groupmates tried to give her a hint that we were not, in fact, protesting a modern war, and said something to the effect of "Yeah, Vietnam was bad," to which she replied "You mean Iraq," and continued to praise us until she walked away.
Not-so-similarly, after the second take a man approached us, informing us that if we tried to protest anything in China we would be killed and our organs would be sold for profit because of their harsh communist government, and he proceeded to give us handouts reading as much (including detailing exactly how much said body parts would be worth in such a situation). After some rather ill-placed remarks about Liberals to which I am not ashamed to say I took offense, he walked away, leaving the six of us to be satisfied with our footage and pack up.
Of course, because my project group included four teenage boys, anything on the 60's must include something having to do with the foundation of the fine institution of Taco Bell. So after one commercial filmed in public at such a location, we decided that we had reached our humiliation quota and moved to one groupmate's house. There we filmed such fine, award-worthy scenes as a reenactment of a historic boxing knockout, the JFK assassination (complete with a go-kart as the presidential motorcade) and our own trailer of "The Sound of Music", which was essentially four group members skipping around me as I played my guitar in the middle of a field (complete with goats), and then five of us skipping back and forth across said field.
It really was way too much fun for something that was originally supposed to be academic, and the entire class today was apparently informed as to the details of our exploits.
And we have at least one more day of filming left...details on that are sure to follow.