State Divided: An Autoethnography of Basketball Fans in the Bluegrass State

Caroline’s Reflection

Throughout this project, I have seen all of the skills that have been taught throughout this course as one cohesive effort, such as balancing “they say” and “I say”, the importance of drafting and revision, and the importance of research and developing an argument. This project was different than the projects that we did earlier in the semester because we had to adapt project 3, which was directed towards a scholarly article, into a video that was directed towards a popular audience. This was something that I have never done before. It was challenging to balance the “they say” and “I say” because so many sources were used in project 3, but the video would not be interesting for a popular audience if we used all of the sources. We also had to gather pictures and video footage, which was something that we have not done in this course. I learned a lot about what fair use is and how can use information from outside sources in our work, without it being a copyright issue. I know that this skill will help me throughout college, and beyond. Throughout this class, I have definitely learned that good writing takes time and effort. As the semester has gone on, I have spent more and more time on each project. I realize that my writing is not likely to be perfect, but writing a first draft and then spending a lot of time revising it is a good way to make it as good as it can possibly be.

Although we, as a group, spent a good amount of time on this project, and met several times outside of class, if we had more time we could have made the video even better. A challenge that we faced that we could have fixed if we had time was that we rented a camera, but while editing the video, we realized that the video quality could have been a lot better. This did not crucially affect our video, but it was something that could be improved upon. I think that our team worked well together because we all communicated well, and this is something that is vital to a group project being successful. We also utilized the skills that we each individually had and contributed to the group, so that we could produce the best possible video.

Michael’s Reflection

When we first began this final project, I do not believe that I fully understood the amount of work that would be required to pull it off. As I completed the first three projects I found that I incorporated new techniques that, as a writer, I has not used before in my academic career. I think that with each project the expectations grew in complexity and in overall interaction with the sources used. With Project 4, I found this to be quite different. Rather than interacting with a piece of literature we found in the library or in a database and analyzing it, we were forced to incorporate our peer’s experience and “I say” as well as the resources they used within the paper. While writing my first three essays, I found it to be relatively easy to balance my summarization and analysis of sources with my own opinion and elaboration of those sources. This was due to our peer review workshops as well as my regular trips to the writing center. With Project 4 I felt that it was not as simple as finding a balance of “They Say” and “I say” within the video. I believe that as a group this was probably our biggest hurdle. After choosing to use Helen’s autoethnography, we set out to find quotes and passages that we believed would be good to use in our video. Within Helen’s essay we found a lot of great material that we felt could translate into our video, however, we discovered that there is a significant difference between what one can say in an essay as opposed to in a video. Essentially, we had to “translate” what Helen said and the evidence she presented into a script that could be easily voiced over in the video. After drafting our script for a few days, I believe that we came up with a script that does a good job of representing her autoethnography. As a group we worked well together; after a few meetings we began to understand how use each other’s strengths in order allocate the work that needed to be done. I think that if we were to re-do our project, that the only thing we would change is the camera on which we filmed our footage. After the presentation by the man from the technology department in the library, I believe that we were under the impression that by using one of their cameras we would be getting high quality video that would really improve our final product. After we transferred the footage to iMovie we noticed that it was pretty bad quality all around, it was very blurry and the audio required some enhancing later on. While this doesn’t take away from the overall purpose or goal of our video, it doesn’t necessarily help to make our video any better.

Helen’s Reflection

We began this project with a lot of reflection. We focused on thinking about what we had learned this semester and trying to figure out how we could incorporate that into this final project. From there we began to rhetorically analyze the ethnography and decide how my decisions as writer could be translated into a video that would give the same effect to a popular audience. We then broke down the paper into parts and began scripting. We divided up tasks between the three of us that highlighted all of our strengths. Michael was logistics, he was always ready to plan a meeting or get the tools together to make our plans come to life. Caroline was our tech star, she was our editor and the voice of reason when our movie dreams got too big for iMovie. I helped translate the paper. I made sure that we stuck with the ideas that I was trying to put forth overall and get together we made a pretty sweet video.

We hit a few bumps in the road as most groups do when working together but we got through them in productive ways which i think ultimately made our project stronger. We struggled getting started, That was a major hurdle. We had a hard time getting to a point at which we could begin filming or even write a script. We got over this by buckling down and staying at starbucks until we felt like we could say that we had made progress and that got us where we needed to be. Additionally, we had to make a decision on the quality of the video. We struggled witch camera quality and had to make the decision to focus on the content as opposed to the visuals. I think that this made us all learn a lesson on the importance of quality of content over images.

Finally, looking forward, I personally plan to continue growing as a writer in every way that I can. I like the idea of truly thinking about everything that I put together and thinking critically about my choices. One of the biggest problems I’ve ever faced was settling. I’ve always been a good enough writer naturally so I never thought that work was necessary and it’s taken this class and the reflection that has come with it to realize that I can be so much more if I put my mind to it. I dont think I’ll ever be able to settle again.