Unit 3 Reflection

Unit 3 Reflection

Our genre/medium for our Unit 3 Project was using technology and creating a movie (on iMovie) to show our audience the impact technology has on our body image; specifically social media. We posted our movie on Youtube in order to better reach our audience. We thought making a movie would be the best way to display all of our findings because we wanted to show previous videos made by Dove, we also wanted to interview people our age and hear what they had to say about the impact social media has had on their image, and lastly, we wanted to provide pictures/articles while doing a voice over to explain their importance. We felt creating a movie best combines all of these aspects to reach our audience in a very diligent and thorough way. To provide further detail, our audience specifically reaches our generation, being people both in high school and college (around the ages of 15 to 21).

We submitted our Unit 3 Project movie to our projected audience by posting it on Youtube. Therefore, when people search key words like "technology impact on body image" or "body image" our video will come up and people within our generation are then able to watch it and listen to what we have to say. Also, Youtube is a very popular video watching platform/research findings for people in both high school and college. Furthermore, it is almost guaranteed that people our age will come across our video and hopefully take the time to watch it. We truly want to show people that technology is capable of so much and what you see in the magazines and the billboards is not always realistic. A person should not be so insecure and down on themselves because they are always looking at false advertisements and images, therefore giving themselves false hope. We want to ensure everyone is happy with their body and sharing our movie on Youtube will give our audience the opportunity to hear that. The cover and introductory materials we provided was a video made by Dove showing how much makeup and editing goes into a photoshoot and then onto a major billboard and that the beauty we see is not always the true beauty behind the scenes. We felt that this was a strong introduction and a smart way to pull our audience in and become interested in the topic since it is such an outstanding and surprising video. This will make them want to continue watching our movie. Now looking at creating a narrative, most of our pitches from Unit 2 were Instagram Polls. Instagram Polls are a great way to interact with many people, especially people within our generation because majority of people our age have Instagrams and look at stories. It is so easy for our followers to simply press an answer on a poll and its a great way for us to easily interact with our audience. We asked a question on our topic from unit 2 and created a poll with two options that viewers could choose from. For example, Juliana's pitch asked our generation, "Do you think social media affects your writing?" and people could vote either yes or no. Looking at the results, majority of people voted yes (108 people) and only some people voted no (41 people). This went to show that people do believe social media influences their writing whether that be in a negative or positive way. Making a pitch can really help you get more research and insight on the topic you are exploring and also, it allows you to gain one on one feedback from your intended audience! Focusing back on our Unit 3 Project, we would like our audience to respond to our movie by providing feedback, comments, and questions to what we had to say. It is always normal for people to either agree or, especially, disagree with something said on a strong topic, therefore the comments we receive will only help us learn more on this topic we researched. More importantly, we truly want people to be inspired by our movie because we want the young adults within our generation to realize that not everything is how it seems. Photoshop is real. Many, if not all, companies use it to make their products and advertisements look much more appealing. Some companies now a days actually promote "#nophotoshop" or "#real" in order to let buyers know that they do not conform to these editing ways and what they show is real, confident beauty. We want our audience to not feel bad about themselves and not look at their body image in a negative way simply because companies use photoshop and because social media gives off false advertisements. 

A comment that a classmate has posted on one of our blogs that we will focus on was on Morgan's blog and it stated, "Your reflection was very well put together, easy to follow, as well as intriguing. I loved the use of all the different colors, it really caught my attention. Great job!" This comment was left on Morgans blog under her Unit 2 Reflection. This comment definitely influenced her writing because she knew that the way she set up this reflection Prezi was easy for people to follow and well put together therefore the strategies she used here can also be used efficiently in the future. Morgan definitely put this thought into our Unit 3 Reflection writing because she gave different ideas to help this reflection in an effective way. Using a direct quote from this reflection to show this is when we earlier stated, "we wanted to show previous videos made by Dove, we also wanted to interview people and hear what they had to say about the impact social media has had on their image, and lastly, we wanted to provide pictures/articles while doing a voice over to explain their importance." This displays a concise order of what we wanted to show in our project and giving this list step by step shows why we did a movie out of all the platforms we could've used. The comment Morgan received influenced the writing of our reflection because the classmate said her unit 2 reflection was "easy to follow". This sentence we provided as example is also very easy to follow, being that it is in a list, therefore Morgan used this compliment made on her blog in an effort to help the writing of this reflection.

Overall, this reflection helps us look back on our Unit 3 Project and movie and see why we made what we made. We want to truly influence people and make sure they know that technology can have such major influences on our body image and how people see themselves. Although technology has many positives and perks to all that it has brought to our world, it can also be so powerful that it can make people see things much differently. Our movie is an attempt to display all of the downsides technology, photoshop, and social media has on peoples body perspective. We want to make people feel comfortable in their own skin and realize how much technology really does in this day and age.