This is where we post our videos, experiences, thoughts, and discoveries. The video blog is a great place to learn about the topics and techniques covered in SMASH Video. Feel free to leave a comment!

Hi everyone,

My PSA is about SMASH students being the future of this society. I decided to make this my topic becuase I felt it could motivate our students and further expose us to the world by letting others knwo that we are strong students of color who will form and create the future of this world.

I decided to do a "montage"-type PSA featuring many SMASH scholars in order to further portray the fact that ALL of us are the future, not jsut a select few of us. I don't really have much else to say about my PSA because it is pretty self-explanatory and more of a proclamation than anything else.

I dedicate this especially to my class of OHNINE!

Basically it’s the 1st year SMASH scholars stating what SMASH is to us and sending out the message that we need to advocate for each other.

For my PSA, the last video project for the class, I decided to do it on the percentage of minority groups that graduated with a four years bachelors degree or higher and work.  For this last tech project, a group of people decided to join in my project. It wasn’t easy working in a group of ten people. It was hard trying to find how everyone could have a part in the PSA. I really appreciated how everyone want to be involved and pitch their own ideas and any form of help that they could give from providing the music to just being featured  in the film .

This particular PSA was created to reflect the percentage of Asian Americans, African Americans, Latinos/ Hispanics, and Native Americans that enter the work force with a bachelors degree or higher. The purpose of this PSA is to raise the awareness about the amount of minorities that have any sort of higher education in today’s job market. The numbers are pretty surprising especially for the fact that the “minority” groups represented in this PSA are the ” majority” of this country. The video is directed towards the youth, especially the youth of color and the future generation.

Many people were surprised to see that the numbers were pretty low. But most people were puzzled by the amount of Asian Americans that actually have a bacherlors degree or higher. Although the percentage for this minority group was about 50%, this number puts a defining limit on the stereotype of Asians proving that every minority group even whites are face with the challenge of graduating from college with a degree.

In order to display the statistics, I had people from the ethnic groups being represented by a certain number, created the number by using their bodies. I felt that it would be powerful to see, the people being affected by such small numbers.

The film that Karina Diaz and I made together was called Two Guys and One Sandwich. When I thought of what movie I should make for my silent film , I thought that I should do a funy chase scene. The plot of this movie is:

After spending time and dedication into making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the protaganist Joseph finds his beloved sandwich sandwich-napped( if that is a real word) by Josee (actually Jose). 

I thought that the video was hilarious especially because it was fun to make and direct. 

Watch and See….

The message of our PSA was to show the number of minorities in the working world with a bachelor’s degree or higher to try and encourage our audience, those in school, those in pursuit of a degree, and those who may be thinking about giving up their education to stay on track so that we will raise the statistics. By getting a higher degree, people will have something to fall back on if anything were to happen in the future. I really think that our PSA is a very effective PSA, because students are relaying the message that there are only a certain amount of underrepresented people in the work force with a bachelor’s or higher, and that there should be more. Students are basically saying the message to other students, whether in grade school, middle school, high school, or college, to show that the students in the PSA understands what is happening and that they want others to know so something can be done.

I have multiple roles in this PSA. I worked closely with Vivian to capture videos of our interviewees, I was in the video, and I worked on the timeline, before and after it was lost. I cannot really give a number on how long I have worked on the project. Although, if we had more time, I think I would have re-taped some of our videos, so that some would flow better and some would have better sounds. Overall, I think we did a really good job for the amount of time we were given.

The last assignment for technology 2 we had to make a PSA for the class. Our group decided to do the PSA on the rate in colleges. The video basically explains how we as teenagers, future college students should raise the rates of graduates students, we should not even care the what others think, but we should make a difference in this world, by attending college and making the best out of it. For the PSA I helped the group construct the way we wanted, basically deciding how the video should be set up and how to make sure that the transitions are nice and just goes as a flow. The group and I decided that we should have more than one-person repeat the same rate number and the picture. I also participated by coming up in the video. If I had the chance to make changes to this video I would probably have the students talking in a bright room, to make it more important and stand out, and have the students say certain things in more different language for the message to spread in may different languages. I would also add different types of music in different places of the video. And probably make the ending a little bit more different, but at the end I enjoy what our group made and hopefully you would all do as much as we do.

The message of my Public SMASH Announcement is to not only remind people of our troops in Iraq but to bring them back home where their family and children are. My audience is in general, the united states. I hope to remind everyone who watches that we still have soldiers out in war and it isn’t right that they cannot return home yet. My PSA is effective in that everyone has family and it makes a hole in the family to know that you have a loved one in the face of danger everyday. I spent all my time about 5 hours to making and finding the right pictures and making a collaboration of all the pictures in a meaningful silent PSA. If I had more time I may have added some video to it instead of pictures.

The point of our PSA is to raise awareness of the very low numbers of ethnicities other than white that work and have a bachelors or higher. It is also meant to help motivate these people to act against the statistics and work to go to college and get a degree. It has a simple format in which we asked several people of various backgrounds to say the one simple sentence which is only changed to accomodate the number and the group of people it belongs to. We then incorporated the bodies of people of different ethnicities actually protraying the numbers. We focused the PSA by using only one sentence and using mostly teenagers who are or have the possibility of going to college. The audience is people of color who are on the way through school to college. This PSA is effective through good music that teenagers can relate to as well as the use of teenagers actually saying the statistics and asking for a change in them.

During the project, I helped film a bit of the numbers as well as recruiting and filming the African American students. I also created the titles and text for the film. I also helped with a bit of the sound problems during the edit.

If I had more time I probably would have helped more with the filming portion as well as with the editing.

The message of this PSA was to inform the public about a imbalance in the workplace. The statistics of this imbalance were shown through our bodies in the beginning of our PSA. Then through repetition of statistics of how many people of various ethnicities had at least a bachelor’s degree, we were trying to help motivate people from various underrepresented communities to take initiative to finish higher education. In order to reach the goal of having a more diverse community in the work place, we realized that we had to start from the source of the river – mainly, the teenagers who will start their journey into higher institutes of learning. Thus, all of the people in this PSA are teenagers, so that the teenagers who see this PSA will be able to better relate. Also, because the statistics were different for different ethnicities, we had each person of a specific ethnicity to talk about the information that pertained to them. This PSA will hopefully affect the underrepresented teenage community who may or may not have thought about attending college. By seeing fellow teens who look and are like themselves, the teens watching this PSA may become inspired to take their education to a whole new level. Plus, the modern music in the background only adds to the teenagers being lured into watching this PSA.

For this project, i helped with editing parts of the audio and also helped with taking pictures of the statistics represented by fellow SMASH scholars. If i had more time, however, i would have worked on helping with special effects and editing the visual part of the video itself, as i am not as efficient in these areas. I chose to help with the parts that i worked on because there was a limited amount of time, and these things were the things that i knew would be easier for me.

I am extremely proud of this assignment. I feel as though all of the work that I put into this assignment means so much more because i know that the people who will watch the video will have a chance to change their minds about their outlook on life and their personal goals. This was the perfect project for me considering I was able to really express what I wanted people to realize about students of color not wanting to conform to society’s views. The reason for me using the students in SMASH, besides the convenience, was the fact that we truly embody the idea of breaking the stereotype. We have made it our goal to become successful individuals in everything that we do because we believe that we have the capability to always strive for excellence.

Something about this video made my interest of wanting students of color be involved in whatever they desired explode. As I worked on the project more and more I had even more of m drive come to light. This allowed my inspiration to manifest to attack the issue head on of society characterizing students of color. It was then that I decided that I would go about the assignment using actual students to show other students that it is alright to go against the norm and reach full potential. Through this hopefully students are able to see that there are others that have a common goal of doing what they want in life. In addition to my audience being other students, my goal is to reach out to people who have embedded this idea in their heads that students of color must act a certain way or do certain things in school in order to be characterized as a “teen of color”.

This project was actually fully done by myself. It took a lot of effort to really get it to the level that I wanted to present it in. Filming was the easiest part for this project because i did not have people talking into the camera but rather I just showed bits of people in their element to demonstrate what they recorded for the audio. The audio at times was hard to work with because I in the beginning I had problems with what to record the students with but eventually I decided that I was best to use the mic embedded right into the computer. I do not believe that I would have changed much if I would have had much time although I do believe that I would have worked on the clearness of the audio so that there would be no spots where it sounded foggy. It came out great and I am truly proud of my work.

For my Public Service Announcement, I decided to recite a poem that I recently discovered. This poem, “Famous” by Naomi Shihab Nye, is a poem that basically says that being famous does not require a significant action. Personally, I wanted to do this PSA [along with Vivian's] because I thought that it was important to get the message through to many people. A lot of people go through life thinking that there has to be a significant action that leads to fame, but this poem says otherwise.

All credits go to Naomi Shihab Nye

Message: The SMASH Academy class of 2009 is the generation of the future.

Messenger(s): All the messengers will be SMASH Academy students; as many as it takes for them to say the message

Format: Ummmmm many people saying one word at a time and then putting it together?

Focus: The future

Audience: the audience consists of everyone; particularly those who may not know what the SMASH Academy is.

Action: I suppose my PSA is not necessarily one that persuades others to do any one specific thing other than to instigate curiosity about the SMASH Academy and inform them that we ARE the future!

The final assignment of our last year of technology was to create a PSA, in which we had to take a stand or discuss an issue that we were interested in. I did a PSA on how young women and girls should define beauty instead of letting society define it for them.

I felt that this was a very important topic to discuss seeing as though many young girls in America as well as  all over the world struggle with trying to be the “perfect beauty”. With this piece I tried to show that beauty comes in every shape,size, color and from and not one especially society should define what beauty is but YOU.

Hi Everyone,

I’m Juan Del Toro and here is my video, “Raising the Rates.” In this video, I’m showing the percentages of Latinos attending college and how motivation could help make a positive affect on these percentages. For this video, I asked a number of students to write down facts of the percentages of Latinos in college. (Special thanks to the people who made this video possible.)

My message is to inform the public of how motivation would be able to make a positive change in the Latino community. My audience is the world, because motivation should be given to everyone in order to make a positive affect on what you believe in. I spent at most two hours or less on making this video. If I had more time, I would have added in more people writing down the opportunities that are offered to Latinos and on how “spreading the word” about these opportunities, along with motivation, could also make a positive affect in the rates of Latinos attending college.

I hope you enjoy,

Juan Del Toro

i made this “silent film” with Tommy. We each edited the film and had a part in filming it. We came up with the same idea for the music and it all came together nicely.

For the past three years in high school, I have noticed something. There are phases that a typical high school goes through each year, no matter what year and no matter who. Although this may not be the case for all students, it IS the case for MOST students. In this video are clips of several high school students. The segments of video are broken up into phases and grouped together to show the different types of motivation, procrastination and success. The music is “Streamline” and it goes from a normal speed [to display the fact that it is the beginning og the school year and everything is going "fine" for all students], then it slows down [due to the fact that students are in the stages of procrastination and school is "slow" to them], then the music speeds up drastically [to display the mind of a high schooler that is going through stress and has to do things last minute and all at once], and finally, the music goes back to its normal tempo [because in the end, students are back to the feeling of "fine" when things are over].

 

Richard and I decided to make this video because we thought a silent fight scene would be funny so we recruited Henri and Carlos as some actors and this is what we made. The end says: The moral of the story is not to over work yourself or a freakishly tall dude will beat you up and a stranger will laugh at you then fall. =]

 

1. Post your group’s PSA yourself
2. State the message of this PSA, its format, and how you focused it to make it relate to your audience
3. State your audience, and describe, in your own words, how this PSA is effective.
4. Describe your role in the project, how much time you worked on it, what you would have done if you had even more time.

In this video I record the different styles of fashion SMASH scholars dress up with. All styles are unique and they give each person a lively personality.