A Reflection on the Making of “Naturally Me”

Our fourth and final project of the semester consisted of adapting one of our randomly assigned group member’s autoethnography from project three into a video project. At first, we were all nervous about choosing whose project to use, because it didn’t necessary have to be the one receiving the best grade; we wanted to choose one that included a lot of personal evidence and one that we could vision put into video format. After reading through each other’s projects as a homework assignment, we chose to adapt our video from Olivia’s project three autoethnography regarding natural hair as an in-group, because after reading it we were able to quickly envision clips that we wanted to include in the project, both serious and not-so serious.

In Olivia’s paper, she wrote about how, historically, African American women have been discouraged to have pride in their natural hair because it contradicts Eurocentric standards of beauty. Relaxing is a prime example of this. Hair relaxers are a chemical product, mainly used by African American women, that permanently changes the structure of curly hair to be straight. Because of a recent ongoing conversation regarding acceptance of natural beauty, there has been a surge in African American women, like Olivia, to disengage and overcome culturally assimilating perceptions of natural beauty. Since Olivia’s paper had an abundance of personal evidence concerning her experienced as a once relaxed, now natural young African American woman, she was able to add to the conversation by including her experience with conformity to culturally assimilating ideals and later appreciation of her natural beauty.

We knew the purpose of our project would be to adapt scholarly work about natural hair as an in-group to a popular audience. So we began by assigning positions right off the bat to get started. It became clear that Summer would be the leader of the group, Olivia would be the face and voice of the video, and Crawford would be used as a sort of wrench that could fit in anywhere as needed.

Early on in our planning stages, it was apparent that finding a time to all get together would be a struggle. Since this project was taking place during the busiest time of the year, everyone in our group had a full plate of tasks at hand, including work study, other assignments for finals, and other extracurricular activities. As an alternative to meeting as a group, we began formulating ideas via a google document so that we could all contribute whenever and wherever to a draft of the storyboard outline and script before our first deadline. However, even with this google document in place, we continued to struggle with communication in the early stages of this project, even with Summer politely pressing urgent matters that needed to be addressed.

Early on, the group message that we had created proved vital to our ability to communicate quickly and effectively. This communication was essential due to our inability to meet in the beginning of our project drafting. We found ourselves all meeting separately at different times in order to film little bits and pieces of the project. Everyone in our group also worked on the shared storyboard and script, thus proving an efficient way to collaborate all of our ideas together in one place and allow every member to contribute. Flexibility was an asset that our group was forced to adopt very quickly, since everyone found themselves on different schedules.

Going into the shitty first draft deadline, our group knew that our video was far from the final project. This draft had little content and consisted mostly of pictures and a few words. After seeing how far ahead everyone else in our class was during the first viewing, we knew we had to buckle down and quickly get to work in order to catch up with the rest of the class. Nonetheless, watching their videos and examining their rhetorical choices helped us formulate ideas for our own project. First and foremost, we needed more content than we had in our first draft. We also needed to condense and subtly blend our scholarly sources (“they say”) and Olivia’s experience (“I say”) for a popular audience. By doing so, this would give different perspectives on the subject and additionally engage the popular audience by bringing something new each scene. Since our rhetorical situation changed from project three to project four, it was extremely important to focus on our popular audience so that we could make our video understandable and powerful. This change in audience reinforced that we have to always remember why we’re writing and who we’re writing for.

As a group, we chose to complete the script in its entirety first, so that we could film most of what we needed for the second draft all at once. Then, we came up with a time that everyone could meet, which proved to be the turning point in our struggle. Since the script was complete, we were finally able to get the bulk of the material filmed and recorded in one sitting.

Our second rough draft that we created showed how far we had come in such a short time period. It was at this point we were able to see how we were now on even footing with the other groups in the class. We heavily considered our rhetorical choices and realized there were different methods of doing so in a video format. Using actual pictures for a popular audience proved the most effective evidence for our project. It strongly appealed to ethos and logos because the pictures served as credibility for the personal accounts given and also made the ideas we introduced more logical. We continued to “show” instead of “tell” in other parts as well. We depicted the damaging ideas of what the standard of beauty is through video by having Summer in a flattering scene twirling with positive descriptions of Eurocentric beauty in voiceover and then a blunt video of Olivia to show the stark contrast of the descriptors that devalue black hair. This appealed to the pathos because the audience can view a living human with facing disheartening experiences. Personal pictures also allowed the viewer to make a direct comparison of Olivia’s natural hair to her relaxed hair, her relaxed hair to white hair, and her natural hair to white hair.

From this point on it was rather smooth sailing, as just littles edits here and there were needed to put the final touches on our video. At this point, we considered our diction and phrasing because not everyone in the group had a clear understanding of relaxers, since Olivia was the only one to have used them. Being from the in-group, Olivia picked up on seemingly subtle differences in Summer and Crawford’s description that were actually more considerable differences. For example, we considered our brief definition of relaxers as “something that makes curly hair easier to straighten” questionable because there are some relaxer products that people with natural black hair can use when flat-ironing their hair to aid in straightening, but it doesn’t permanently change the chemical construction of the hair strands. However, we decided that since we go into what a relaxers Olivia used later, that distinction could then be made by the audience. We learned as a group that choosing specific phrasing can be powerful when presenting to an audience because you do not want what the message to be misconveyed or wrongfully perceived.

All in all, our successes came from compromise as a group. Every group member had a clear role and effectively executed that role by the end of the project. Without Summer engaging the group, we all would have been lost. Summer truly lead us through the dark times and helped guide the group in the right direction by delegating out the work load, while Olivia and Crawford kindly acted upon her requests without hesitation. The job of putting the video together was a big one and Summer handled it well. Overall, this project was deeply rooted in teamwork. It taught us how to become more flexible and creative in a way that was all inclusive. In this day and age, though nothing can truly replace physical communication, we have access to mobile and virtual means of collaboration and communication and we utilized it to our advantage. This whole project allowed for us to be collaborative and find humility and humbleness toward each other in addition to seeing the success of a completed project as the success of all its contributors. In the future, we will each undoubtedly have to work in groups, which have to balance and maintain levels of individual responsibility and group accountability. If one feels that responsibilities are not delegated appropriately one must address it because it could compromise the success as a whole.

— Summer Collins, Crawford Sloan, & Olivia Steed