SUBJECT: Melissa Kaufler
Hadley Holyoak
Bryce Bolick
In the words of Abraham Lincoln, "I don't like that person. I must get to know him better."
For our subject we chose Bryce’s friend from home, Melissa
Kaufler. Melissa is a young adult that has spent many years being actively
involved with the democratic political party. We believe that Melissa is a
concerned citizen because of her efforts to enforce involvement with politics
and the decision making of our great nation.
She is from our home town of Santa Clarita, and we were able
to connect with her over memories of campaigns and through sites like facebook,
the Signal (our hometown newspaper), and good ole’ google we were able to pull
together a reflectional documentary on different backgrounds of people that
grew up in a similar environment.
A concerned citizen is someone who works to participate in a
movement or activity that is beneficial to their community, or changes
something so that their community can improve. Melissa’s desire to encourage
people to register to vote was her way of bettering her community. Even though
we disagree with her political opinions in many ways, we believe she is doing
aservice to her community in promoting the need to vote and have empathy for
others. When you find you disagree with an individual, you may need to look
harder to find the good that they contribute to the world, but it is there.
When editing together this short documentary, we quickly
realized that we had much more footage than was needed. We decided to focus our
attention on her actions that she took towards something she really believed
in, and not so much on her political opinions. The main message we wanted to
get across was that she helped her community and promotes democracy and
empathy, which are admirable traits. We included images over her audio, which
we hoped would give more of a profiling affect and help the audience to understand
who she is as a person, who she was, and who she aspires to be.
In the article that we read for this project, entitled Human
Rights and Culture: From Datastan to Storyland, it argues that paying attention
to the art pieces in certain communities is a way to become aware of societal
issues that aren’t necessarily showing up in the stats. Art is a beneficiary to
society, for the world cannot be run by those who only know math and science.
We should pay attention to the artists we have now, for they are more attune to
the social issues around them due to their seeking for inspiration in all
corners of the world, and we should not limit the creativity of our young
people. For someone to become a well-rounded citizen it takes exposure to
multiple aspects of our complicated world: science, math, art, issues, etc.
Many create documentaries, such as the one we created, about
someone who shows their desire to change something in their community that they
see as an issue, or someone who simply participates in something they see as
beneficial. In this way does art raise awareness to a particular aspect of
society that many should be aware about. Even though I vary in political views
from Melissa, she did share some powerful statements about the importance of voting
and it has inspired me, and hopefully others, to become more involved in that
aspect of life as a free citizen.
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