Reflecting On Women’s Participation in Weight-lifting

Adaptation was a common theme for our group as we worked through project four. This adaption not only took place literally, transforming our autoethnography from text to video, but also figuratively, as we each made personal developments. When beginning this project, we determined that our driving forces were our audience and our purpose. In order to choose the right paper to adapt, we made strategic decisions on which in-group would be most relatable and relevant to our new popular audience. Our audience not only influenced our essay choice, but also the rhetorical strategies we used in presenting our information and argument. In order to maintain our clear purpose of expressing the social and cultural barriers limiting women’s participation in weight-lifting we used a more literal translation from text to video. In addition to challenging our creativity, this project also challenged us to evaluate our communication and cooperation skills in a group setting. Though a lack of communication was evident in our process, we feel that we have met the project’s goal of creating an effective and persuasive visual autoethnography.

The first step we took in our process was addressing which autoethnography to adapt. In order to do so, we exchanged individual papers. After several discussions, we came to a quick consensus that Michael and Caroline’s autoethnographies generated the highest level of group interest and would transition best to the big screen. While Erika and Stefan were both interested in their respective project three papers, our group recognized that overall, they were not the best option for the group’s interests. Michael’s auto-ethnography focused on the relationship between college athletes and Christianity. As a group, we felt that this topic would have transitioned well to film because we could have narration while we show images, graphs, charts and video of Christian college athletes. However, we settled on Caroline’s auto-ethnography. Caroline delved into the ideals of femininity, masculinity, media’s promotion of these ideals, and the ways in which these ideals affect female fitness behaviors, particularly the lack of participation in weightlifting. Further, this argument seemed to spark shared interests within our group, and we all were able to envision ways to transition this argument to a cinematic work. One specific reason for our selection was that our audience, our peers, who utilize the Miller Center. The Miller Center is a key aspect of Caroline’s argument. There is no better example of the fitness gender divide than here at Wake, where the treadmills and ellipticals are almost totally occupied by women, and the weight room is oozing with testosterone. Finally, Caroline had a strong interview about the benefits of weightlifting for women with her personal trainer, and by utilizing images, footage of the miller center, and other evidence like charts and graphs, we felt we could incorporate Caroline’s topic into a video format very well. Overall, by narrowing down our options through discussion and our writing journals, we selected Caroline’s as it drew common interest, would transition well to a short film and because of the strong example of the fitness gender roles present in our backyard at Wake Forest. Our next task was determining how we would appeal to our audience.

In moving from a more scholarly paper to a video with a popular audience, we had to reflect a lot on project two. This caused us to really look at our audience, primarily our classmates, and consider the best rhetorical choices to reach them. One of the biggest changes was in the way the words and narration work. If we were to just read the paper as narration it would be too dense and the audience would lose interest. In this case, the viewers would be overwhelmed by the information and be unable to focus on the images they are seeing on the screen. Therefore, we had to create a narration from the information in Caroline’s scholarly paper that would keep the audience engaged. We did this by pulling out the specific scholarly research we felt has necessary to mention for our argument, and including as much of Caroline’s personal experience as possible. Another part of moving from a scholarly to popular work, and therefore from project 3 to project 4 was recognizing that the purpose of the project had changed. The purpose or message we were trying to communicate did not change, but our mean of expressing it did. The original purpose of our autoethnographies was to put what we had been learning in the class about writing into general to practice, while specifically improving our research skills and writing in APA format. With the video the purpose is much different. While we added citations for photos and videos, the scholarly research portion had been completed during project three. The purpose here is more to get a general audience, our classmates, interested and engaged in our topic. We want them to come away more knowledgeable about female weight lifting and its benefits, the stereotypes that come with it, and an understanding of Caroline’s personal experience. To achieve our new purpose, we had to focus on the HOC’s first. As a group we had to agree that our thesis was abundantly clear, which was something we asked every feedback group. Next our evidence on screen and the evidence in our narration had to match up. The introduction and conclusion both focused on pictures of Caroline herself to add pathos, the personal connection. as well as add ethos to Caroline by showing that the topic, female weightlifting, is something she is truly a part of. While the HOC’s in both the paper and the video were similar categories, the LOC’s in a video project were much more different. These were the last things we focused on, but in this project they included things such as checking audio levels and other smaller details. These proved to be very important in helping prevent distractions from the real purpose of the video.

When considering the adaptation of a paper into a video, there are many things to consider. The first choice is whether or not you wish to make the video a more abstract adaptation rather than a very literally one, abstract in the sense that you are creating dramatics of what is written. For instance, if the writing goes into the feeling of being awkward in a particular situation, rather than just narrating that something is awkward, you can show it through first person camera angles, or facial expressions. Our group decided for this particular film adaptation to make a more literal translation from text to film. As for getting the information to our audience we had a full narration read by a team member and put visuals to accompany the voice. The idea behind this derives from the intent to be sure that the viewer understands what the problem is, why it is a problem and what should change and how that change is for the better. With a vocal narration it’s quite simple to add in pieces of the work that we are creating the film about, including references and other research to help our argument. The visual aids are as they are named, assist the viewer in their understanding of our thesis. We took examples from different websites of how men are significantly more represented than women in the media for weight lifting, we had live shots of the gym to compare the difference in exercise choices between men and women and we added pictures of Caroline actually lifting, seeing that it is her paper and her in-group. Just because we chose a more simplified translation is not an implication that we didn’t wish to “go the extra mile” and rather take the easy road, it just made more sense to us to create the film in the most direct way we could eliminating any and all confusion that may arise about the purpose of the film.

As previously mentioned, personal adaption was a major part of this project as well. Working in a group setting can create many challenges, as each group member has a different personality and work ethic. On thing that Michael learned through this project was that communication is extremely important. Although Michael was familiar with working with film, he had never been involved in film project that wasn’t based around his own inspiration. He found this difficult, but it helped him learn to be more open minded to others ideas and learn to accept the fact that sometimes you have to accept another idea even if you see it differently in your head, especially if it’s for the best interest of the group. Similarly, Caroline also learned the importance of communication. Once the group choose her autoethnography to adapt, she took on the role of group leader. Although Caroline feels she was open to suggestions and ideas of other group members, she also feels there was a lack of proactivity, and that is why the project expresses more dominantly her vision. Perhaps if she had communicated this concern more clearly and the group had met more frequently this could have been avoided. From project four, in addition to Michael and Caroline, Stefan experienced the importance of communication. But furthermore, Stefan gained insight that the average person with simply an IPhone and some IMovie experience can still produce a strong product. Additionally, while the clashing of different view and ideas can be difficult to overcome, Stefan thinks this active struggle creates a better product in the end. Erika feels that working in a group always presents challenges and benefits that are different from solo projects. Personally she thought our group was very good in that everyone has very distinct ideas and possess different skills. Where she feels our group struggled the most was in effective communication. Personally she learned that in a group where everyone is doing most of their work separately since we all have different schedules, with only short and scattered meetings, it means that there needs to be even more communication than expected at the start of the project.

In the end we feel as if we completed our project successfully, using a visual outlet to effectively send a message to our audience. Seeing that writing does not need to be constrained to a text format is something all of us can take with us as we continue on as writers. Furthermore, the personal growths we have made will help us become stronger group members, as working with others will be an essential part of the rest of our college experience as well as in our careers later in life.

Caroline Friezo, Erika Reiter, Stefan Anthony, and Michael Cyphers