Post for April 2

I found out last Thursday that I passed my Oral exam!!! Now I will be able to concentrate strictly on my project.
Dr. Holmevik’s class that I attended last week was an overview of iMovie, but was very helpful in seeing how various aspects of the software work. I feel confident about using Final Cut Pro.
This week I sent my script to Jay Hope for review. I sent it on Tuesday, March 31, so he should get it in a day or two. After he looks it over, I will make any revisions he requests and get it approved by Jay Hope and Dr. Holmevik. After these changes I will finish my script and begin getting ready for my production week, which is April 27. In order to get ready I will get in touch with everyone who I want to interview to set up a time and a place to meet for the interviews. Once I know what my schedule will be during production week, I will post it to my blog.
Also this week, Dr. Holmevik got the students who he is chairing together to give us some tips on how to prepare for our defense. He would like for me to provide each member of my committee with my project paper bound. He would also like for the bound paper to include a sleeve for my film, this way they can each have a nice copy of what I have been working on for all of these months. He told me that I should prepare a five minute presentation to present at the beginning of my defense and then I should discuss what I have done to address the concerns presented to me by my committee. He also told me to be confident and not to be defensive, but positive instead. These tips were very helpful and will prepare me for my defense in June.
Since I did not really have much of my script to work on this week, I decided to begin working on my project paper. I began with the theoretical context section of my paper. In this section I talked the different styles of documentary there are as defined by Bill Nichols in his article “The Voice of Documentary”. I also discussed the rhetorical situation as defined by Charles Kostelnick and David Roberts in their book Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators.
Next I worked on the Method section of my paper. In the method section, I have a subsection entitled research. In this section I discussed the different kinds of research I had to do before I even began making the documentary.
The next subsection of the method section is the process section. In the process section I discussed downloading ‘Celtx’ and using it to write my script. I also discussed the different sections of the script and what is included in each section. I also talked about how I used Kostelnick and Roberts’ rhetorical situation to decide what I needed to do in pre-production and put into my script. I also discussed the style of documentary I would use in creating my film that I learned about from reading Bill Nichols’ article.
The other sections of my paper that I have not done much work on yet include: Purpose, My Client, Problem Statement, and Historical Context. The Historical Context section in my paper will be very similar to the Historical Context section in my proposal. I will speak with Dr. Holmevik about other sections I should include.