Time to plan.

Florence Lawrence; inventor of the brake lights and turning signal.

Now that we are done school officially! (I never thought I would see the day I would say that.) I am relaxed and ready to ... plan out my IPP.  Yup, now that the school work is done we have to start planning out Independent  Professional Projects. These year long projects showcase our creativity in a book, event video, screenplay or musical EP of some sort. And while I don't have an official adviser yet, I'm still going to meet with someone who was on my panel in order to see what needs to be done this summer in preparation for shooting in fall.

Anyways my idea is to do a video documentary on the challenges woman face when it comes to maintaining their vehicles. This documentary will feature me trying to learn the basics of car maintenance without any formal training. As a side note it will also feature a woman mechanic showcasing her skills. It will feature the history of woman in automotives, candid interviews of woman who know plenty about car maintenance and woman who know nothing about auto maintenance.
It is a light humour documentary with plenty of opportunity to laugh.


Did you know
1)Askpatty.com is anall woman's automotive fix-it forum based out of California.
http://caradvice.askpatty.com/

2)According to the National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence, women are taking over the traditionally male-dominated responsibility of maintenance and repair.
http://www.ladieschoiceautocare.com/

3)An actress by the name of Florence Lawrence invented the first turning signal and brake lights.
www.aacamuseum.org/Pdf/WomensHistory.pdf

Armin Wiebe

The Sonata of Beethoven Blatz  started as a novel and ended up as a play. The playwright Armin Wiebe told his talk back audience on Tuesday that the play started as a novel and in a creative writing class he wrote a few short scenes for a screenplay exercise including the novel characters. This ultimately led to the creation of a low-German Mennonite play that takes place in southern Manitoba.

The play is entertaining and cleverly written. It's funny and managed to get all of us non-German folk rolling in our seats at some parts. The costumes were typical prairie farm early 19th century costumes that you would expect of them. The dialogue was flitted with low German but like I said earlier it was all easy to understand. There were some scenes that were beyond me and a few people who sat next to me. But other than that very-entertaining. He makes the characters relatable people with faults and worries and problems. But nothing extraordinary which is found in some plays that are completely unable to relate to. Looking at some of Wiebe's  earlier descriptions of his work. View here.

The website shows some excerpts from his book The Second Coming of Yeeat Shpanst which has a much different tone. It is however not his famous low-German characters that are speaking which is why it may not be as similar to the play. Interestingly enough he seemed to have another voice yet in Tatsea a book set in the Canadian Subarctic in the 1760's. I say this because of a comment that says, "This book should be in schools, Armin. You write like an Indian." Surely the way Indians sound and Mennonites must be different. And that is where I leave with this thought. That maybe it is possible to phase out the old voices and styles and learn new ones. It's certainly worth a shot.

Winding down and giddying up.

The school year is finally winding down - only 6 days left! And then we'll be off to Chicago and starting our summer jobs in the industry (hopefully). I am excited as I start to organize my summer holidays and appointments (that hair doesn't cut itself). But a part of me is sad.

Next year we will be without the all-knowing second years, we will actually BE the second years. This is a exciting and disturbing thought. (As I think back to how many notes I took in to the ProTools test to record one tiny segment). How could I possibly help someone with their technical difficulties? I'm constantly spelling things wrong  and I still haven't finished my montage. But I'm sure I could show a first year to the washroom. That's something isn't it?

Even though there still remains some things I am unsure about, I did learn a lot this year. I learned how to write an article (so much so that when I was writing an essay I kept thinking I need to add a quote from an actual person to liven it up a bit). I learned how to work a ENG camera (which my eye will be glued to for half the upcoming school year as I film my IPP video documentary). I learned how to edit said footage on the lovely Final Cut Pro, and I learned how to write a proper cover letter. Not to mention an entire PR proposal (another thing I'll have to get used to next year as a PR major).

But it was all a lot of fun. While my friends were studying for biology tests and sketching out architectural projects I was pretending to be an avid caller to BOY TOYZ on an infomercial for a call line specializing in men ready to talk to woman. Or creating a magazine on college life in InDesign. Or making a trade show to promote a fake magazine. These things will stay with me forever. Look at all these good memories of CreComm and we haven't even been to Chicago yet!

But now that we are all said and done the "hazing" period of first year and we've survived, we feel like we deserve to go out in the world and share our expertise this summer. I will be working at the same job at Citizenship and Immigration Canada, which is a great experience and not far off from where I want to be after I graduate. (I hope to be in the public sector doing communications work.) But to kick off our summer in the professional world we had to design a personal profile and a business card. Now we feel professional.

The results are in!

So I drove straight home after class today with a shoebox filled with ballots from our magazine trade show tucked tightly underneath my arm. I went straight to my kitchen table and added up how many people came to our booth to hear about P.S. Magazine last Thursday.

And  the grand total is a whopping 109!

So out of those 109 people, 79 signed up for a PDF to be sent to them. I have 79 email addresses entered and I'm just waiting until I get to school tomorrow so I can send them it. The others checked no to signing up for one. But it is still a success!

We got people to fill in this ballot form. Almost all were happy to. And plenty (as the numbers show) expressed to us they wanted to read the magazine. So this final bit of research and evaluation shows the real success of our booth.

A success

After what felt like years, we finally finished our magazine. We did a magazine directed at college and university students entitled P.S. Magazine. It was a humorous lifestyle magazine that had articles such "How to get out of exams" and "Dealing with a schmuck professor."

Our cover photo, big thanks to Michael Tanasychuk for posing in the near-nude

My article "A guide to getting out of exams"

But after writing, editing, and laying out the magazine, we had our finished project. Now we had to promote it in a trade show. Our booth was set up alike a birthday party with streams and balloons, in the magazine colours; blue and yellow. The table cloth was yellow which made it stand out from some of the other table who had modest colours.

We started the fair off by giving away free pizza and root beer, in exchange for people to fill in a ballot with their name and email. This way we could see who came to our booth. We gave away all the pizza in half and our. That means we had 32 people come through our booth in half an hour. That's one per minute.


 After that we brought out a big wheel that you could spin to win prizes. The prizes were college themed like "Date Night" which was two passes for bowling, "Free Dinner" which was Kraft Dinner, "Study Motivator" which was candy, "Job Interview Survival Kit" which was a hair product, "Post Exam Relaxation" which was candles. Thanks to my group members for getting such awesome prizes! As the trade show wore on we ended up pulling out jello shooters and then P.S. cupcakes. This all was a great  success. The result? We haven't tallied it up yet, but the ballot box was full!

It was a success for five reasons:

1) People could interact with our booth
2) People weren't just interested in free food or prizes, the image on the front of the magazine caught their attention and they wanted to know more.
3)People had no problem filling in a ballot and now we know how many people came to our booth.(Well we will when we count the ballots)

4)People were invited to check off if they wanted a PDF of the magazine sent to them and plenty did.
 5) We got some positive feedback from patrons of the booth who loved the magazine.

***I had photos on my BlackBerry but they got erased sadly.

All in all it was a successful trade show and a nice payoff for the final step in the magazine project.