A Totally New Direction

After Tuesday's meeting with the professor, my group desperately tried to find a new direction to take with this project. The original idea had revolved around the intercutting of three storylines about people taking a risk in their lives, tied together by a nice metaphor involving a crosswalk. Basically, the three people in the different stories would end up at the same street corner, and their unwillingness to cross against the signal would reflect on their nervousness about the risks they each had to face.

It actually sounded pretty cool in class.

The problem was; we couldn't get three strong storylines together. That was the professor's main problem on tuesday, that the stories we had weren't strong enough, and were too generic. We tried over the last couple days to come up with new ones, but nothing was any better. Except for one.

Courtney dug up a real event from her high school that we all found very interesting. A co-editor from The Pioneer, the school newspaper, wrote a rather deep (for high school) op-ed piece essentially about race relations. To sum it up, (but not do it justice) it was about a moment in her own life where the horrible societal preconceptions that were buried in her own mind became blindingly clear, and how stupid they were. Of course, some people didn't get what she was saying with the piece, and took it the wrong way. The administration wanted her to apologize for even having written it, but she stood by what she wrote. Then of course it became less about the content itself, and more about her defiance. It sparked off a school-wide controversy, allegations of racism were slung around, the faculty adviser for the paper was fired... it was a mess.

We all thought this made for a great story, and a powerful one, with a clear message about how stupid it is that some very important topics are so taboo that one can't even speak about them
without people jumping to conclusions etc. In class today we got some really good ideas about how to make it work even better, and I think we may have something nice here. Now if only we had more time to work on it...