Inquiry Three

Reflective Essay

            After completion of this project I can certainly say that I managed to stick almost entirely to my original plan. There are a few differences in the finished project from what I had in mind at the outset, but I think that I had to take the advice of Mr. Goldwater and trim some of the fat. I did run into some issues with Final Cut and the rendering of my project, so I was forced to go to the backup plan and re-create my original finished project as best I could in iMovie, but I feel that this wasn’t too big of an issue. The project itself was certainly a little more difficult than I had anticipated when it came time to boil Reagan’s thirty-minute speech down into a piece that I could work into a political advertisement, but I think that I found a good argument. At first glance, the end product may seem simplistic, but I can assure you that this was done with a purpose. I meant to highlight how sensationalist these kinds of advertisements can be in our current political era, as well as the fact that politicians and their campaigns can take opponent’s actions and words completely out of context or expand on something seemingly insignificant until they’re drawing conclusions that were never intended or implied. So I took the clip from an ad Johnson was running at the time, cut it so that it emphasized his battle cry for a “war on poverty” and then immediately opposed that with a clip of Reagan breaking down the spending patterns for welfare programs. This idea expands nicely on the budding polarization of political parties and goes to show how framing is imperative in constructing political ads to sway voters in your direction. Overall, I accomplished what I had set as my overall message and delivery in my outline and although one or two aspects didn’t come to fruition--namely the lack of a voiceover that I simply didn’t have room for, I'm still happy with my final product.