Borana Gjoka
Jared Onnen
Rick Conway
Nick Rock
COMM 250
March 1, 2016
Project Proposal
The
exigence is that the parking ticket prices on campus are $40, and that price is
too high and unjustified considering the primary recipients of most tickets are
college students, most college students have little to no income due to the
amount of time and effort successfully navigating a college course load
requires. In creating the proposed documentary we seek to reach an audience of
not only the UNL Parking Authorities (our primary rhetorical audience) but we
also seek to educate students on specifically why we believe this is a problem
in a way that is more informational than the commonplace gripe against
receiving a violation. To try and create true, substantial change we have made
an effort to directly reach out to the parking office ourselves attempting to
create an environment in which both the university and it’s students can work
together to create a positive environment in which parking policy is enforced
without damaging a student's financial situation to the point of excess.
One
of the constraints for attempting to persuade the UNL parking office to reduce
the parking ticket price is that we do not have access to the necessary
financial data to support the claim that the price of $40 is in fact too high
for the average college student. We have no information on the purpose of the
high parking fine. Being that this project is coming first hand from a student
perpsective and udnerstanding how parking fines affect the student body can be
understood from a more personal point of view. We could conduct very short
interviews with a specific number of students walking around campus to get
statistics on the percentage of the number of students interviewed who support
the claim that the ticket prices are too high and whose college life would be a
lot easier with the price reduction. A short video included in the presentation
will show the affect of getting a $40 ticket on an average college student’s
life. We believe that by showing a unique visual representatioin of the problem
directly portraying a student, we can fully communicate a realistic and
empathetic campaign to lower the charge. We communicate message in the video
through both verbal and nonverbal rhetoric. Our goal is make it clear to
the UNL parking office that the ticket price is a real issue for the UNL
student body. Tickets are a result stemiing from the lack of affordable parking
or parking spaces at all on campus, this ultimately affects the academic
success of the student because no parking often results in students being late
or missing class.
We are taking a head-on approach to improving the substandard
parking situation on our campus. We propose a series of new steps to issue
fines. The first is lowering the cost of parking tickets to under the current
mark of $40. Giving out extra warnings or free passes would be the second
option. From a Biochemistry professor to a freshman in the dorms parking is a
glaring issue that causes stress and cuts deep financially for numerous people
on the University’s campus. We will be filming from the direct perspective of a
full time student struggling to balance a rigorous course load, financial
situation and daily responsibilities. We will show how the current fine for
parking tickets creates an obstacle to achieving his goals opposed to
fulfilling its duty of teaching the violator a lesson.
Borana
is currently working on the script for the short film and she will be filming
and directing it as well any visual art that we will need to make our message
clear. All members of the group will be working together in gathering data and
statistics to support our claim that the ticket prices are too high. Ricky is
in charge of finding out who is our intended audience, the specific individual
who has the power to authorise the ticket price change. Jared and Nick are editors
of the script and written work and assistant director for the film.
Week
1 (Feb 29 - March 6) we will be working on writing and editing the script of
the short film.
Week 2 (March 7 -March
13) we will rehearse and start filming, and conduct interviews around campus
and shoot any visual art that we will need to use.
Week 3 (March 14-March
20) we will edit the film and visual art and organise the collected data in a
form that can be easily presented and usable for our purposes.
Week 4 (March 21-March
28) we will put everything together as one and rehearse our presentation.
Post Project Portfolio
To recap the final result of the group project, we made an informational
documentary with the main purpose being that of educating the parking
authorities and the student body on our justification for a new lesser parking
fine. We chose to challenge ourselves with the taking on of a 10 Point Project
in creating a Short Form Documentary. This is not a decision I would change not
only do we expect this to reflect well in our grade but it also forced us to
take on a task drastically beyond our normal course workload. We used the image
of an average college student going through his daily schedule. The purpose of
this lies deeper than the common place griping against tickets being a hassle.
We sought to come from a unique and creative medium of showing our message in
communicating to the emotional appeal of the struggles of a student. We show
Ricky who is struggling financially. Struggling to the point that he has less
than 20 dollars in his bank account. When Ricky is shown receiving the ticket
the initial reaction tends to be more judgmental than sympathetic but through
an appeal to the audience's ethos we show how Ricky must put aside his pride,
his sense of independence, and beg his mother to assist him to pay the ticket
lest he will not have enough to pay for summer classes. We mention that this is
another of multiple parking tickets. These can quickly add up to being the cost
of one full three credit class. This applies more to logos in the idea that as
a university the well being and academics of the student is placed first yet
there is some hypocrisy present in that the parking fines can make the
academics of that same student suffer. In regards to our Slogan of “Pinch Not a
Punch” we took the slogan given to us from our professor Damien, and through Imitatio took his words and used them through a mild form of remixing. Surely the
price for the ticket is being used for more than just teaching the student a
lesson, it is to make a profit. And logically if the University cares first and
foremost about the education of it’s students how can they justify using a
population already so burdened with debt to additionally help make a profit for
the university through parking mistakes.
I felt that as a team we experienced some initial cohesive
problems. The group dynamic presented a challenge as we were faced with the
reality of two 19 year old freshmen being paired with two non traditional
students. Together with both these perspectives although some minimal conflict
was present at first eventually the cohesiveness formed into a successful
collaboration. We faced some struggles with technology and had to overcome
initial plans falling through and learn how to adjust on the fly. This wasn’t a
result of a lack of preparation but rather often times there were external
forces at work such as scheduling issues for locations, weather, reliability of
technology, but through the ability to react and adjust these obstacles were
overcome. Overall my only thoughts in regards to what I would change lies
in the initial stages. As a group we did a poor job of communicating
effectively and efficiently. This created some delays in planning and
production. Additionally this was our first time filming, if I could choose for
one of us to have prior extensive film experience that would be very helpful in
keeping the execution smooth and precise. To conclude I was rather pleased with
the experience after a total of 24.5 hours of working to create the entire
project we saw growth in our abilities for intergroup and interpersonal
communication, the use of technology in communication, and communicating
through age and culture.
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