McCloskey

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Joshua McCloskey
Gokce Tekeli
WRD 111
December 11, 2015
Video Project Reflection
I feel that our video project was very successful as a whole. I definitely feel
like it went better than I thought it would have. In regards to the specific question, I
feel that the peer review feedback was contradictory at times. Many times I noticed
that different students responses for different suggestions contradicted each other.
One person stated that our use of no music was a good decision for the nature of our
project while another student wrote that it was sad that there was no music in the
video. This is just one of the plethora of examples where student had different
opinions on our video. I would, however, agree that the self-critiquing aspect of the
revision process helped a lot. Watching the video over and over allowed us as a
group to see where change needed to be made. Filling out the review sheets on our
own video was very helpful. Ultimately though, I believe that the instructor
feedback was most beneficial as it showed us exactly what we needed to do to make
the video better. We tried to incorporate and revise everything that the instructor
recommended. It also proved very helpful to email and visit the instructor during
office hours to get insight on what direction we should go with the video. We are
merely amateurs, whereas the instructor is a professional in this field and therefore
a great resource.

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It is of my belief that our choice of using a public service announcement

video was a wise one. This allowed our video to be purely informative and
argumentative to prove our point about UK Dining. We felt that using a skit style
video to make our video would not seem serious enough and would be more
distracting than informative. After all, the first priority in this project was to be
informative and make an argument. After watching some of the example videos in
the early stages in the project, we determined we would go with the commercial
style video. The video that most contributed to this decision was a video with
people arguing the lack of safety on campus through a fake skit of someone being
followed on campus at night. The fact that it was a video project, though, certainly
made the argument making a lot easier. Video projects allow one to use rhetoric
through images, video clips, audio, interviews, text, graphics, and the list goes on
and on. It adds many dimensions to an argument, whereas a arguing paper is just
black words on a white sheet of paper.

If we had another month on this project, there would be a lot more than I

wouldve wanted our group to accomplish. We couldve gotten a lot more videos
and interviews and also have refined what videos we already had even more. UK
Dining was not able to respond to us by our short deadline and therefore, we were
not able to provide their side of the argument. An example of where we couldve
refined our video to be even better is having very few actual images in the video.
Yes, images were likely necessary when showing the hours of operation, map of
dining locations, meal swipe schedule, etc, but it would have been nice to
incorporate more video in other places. One such example is where we were talking

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about dining services on other campuses and comparing it to the University of
Kentuckys. If we had another month to devote all of our attention on this project,
we couldve had a member of our group drive to the University of Louisville and get
some film of their campus to add to our backdrop when we talk about their dining
services. The same can be true for Eastern Kentucky University. Both campuses are
relatively close and it wouldve added to the visible effort we put into our video. We
also couldve tried to conduct interviews of various students on these campuses to
see how they feel about their dining services. I also wouldve liked to conduct more
interviews with students on campus and also perhaps employees who work on
campus to see how they feel the dining situation if for them.

Internally, there are some improvements we couldve made as well.

Communication was disjointed at times, with group members claiming that they
were not getting emails. Having a mixture of text and email communication also
proved to be a bit chaotic at time. For the written portions of the project, I feel that
using a google doc was great as it allowed us to all edit the same document so that
we could then see each others work and provide clear transitions. I was the editor
for the project and put the whole thing together and I did not anticipate it that it
wouldve taken as long as it did. I shouldve started consolidating the video earlier
instead of working on it all in one weekend. Additionally, group members shouldve
submitted their video clips and interviews a bit sooner so I wouldve had time to do
this.

In terms on the class materials helping the video, as I stated earlier, for the

video project the screening of former video projects from the class probably helped

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the most. Second to that was seeing our classmates first cuts in class so we could
see how the quality of our video compared to others and allowed us to decide what
king of changes we needed to make. In my complete honest opinion, the numerous
readings we did didnt help the video project a ton. Lets face it, many of those
articles were written by scholarly academics, whereas our video was going to be
shown to a class of college students like us even though our audience for our video
was UK Dining management and University management. I feel like common sense
could be used to make our argument. We know what appeals to us from other
peoples arguments, so why do we need scholarly papers on ethos, pathos, logos,
and exigence to tell us how to be argumentative. Making an effective argument is
mostly common sense. That being said, academically speaking for the scope of the
class, the readings were likely necessary in order for us to meet the standards of
what we are supposed to learn in WRD 111. Overall, a great class and fun project.