“…Loving Everywhere, but None for You”: Reflection for “A Rose for Emily”

My group members in the final project included Eric Lipsky, Meagan Mier-Garcia and Michelle Umezu. The four of us were pretty open about what text would be the center of our project and what would be our media presentation. In the beginning we tried to decide what we would do for the media production portion of the project. Then we realized it would be easier to choose the text first and then go from there. All of us had similar interests in a few particular texts. We finally made a decision to go with “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. Each of us felt that writing a blog for Emily would be a bit dry and boring, so we knew we definitely weren’t going to write anything. However, the four of us looked into Twitter.com to see if it was worth the consideration, but we unanimously concluded that it wasn’t. I personally thought that it was a weaker and less interesting version of Facebook.com and Myspace.com. The concept of those particular websites I’ve seen again and again, so I had no interest to work with them in the project. Thus we decided on a music video of some sort. Michelle, Eric and I thought that we would find a song that had relation to the short story and then come up with a music video. We pitched the idea to Meagan and she came up with an even better idea, one that along the same idea and also fit all of our schedules. Meagan suggested animoto.com, a site where we find music and images and then it puts together a video for you. She also found a song entitled “A Rose for Emily” by the Zombies.
Once we all met up we decided that animoto.com was too complicated and didn’t allow much wiggle room for anything. The song by the Zombies seemed perfect for the project. The lyrics match aspects of the story. Whether or not the song was inspired by the Faulkner’s story we never found out, but it is very close. The song talks about Emily not getting any love from those all around her, which definitely relates to Emily’s relationships and interactions in the story. I feel that the song is perfect for our project. Using Windows Movie Maker was our final decision for the media production portion of the project. The four of us searched through Google for various images related to the text. To me this was the most challenging part of the entire project. We wanted to make sure that we came up with images that stayed true to the text. Some illustrations that we as a group thought were important we had quite a bit of trouble finding. After hours and hours of individual work we finally reached a stopping point. The four of us came up with some interesting pictures. In the story, my impression of Emily and her servants’ relationship was like that of Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy in the movie “Driving Miss Daisy.” I found images of the stern looking Jessica Tandy from the beginning of the film and her being driven by Morgan Freeman. I next sought after images of the actress in her younger years and ended up coming across some beautiful pictures. The group and I wanted to show that process the protagonist Emily went through over the years. Once we finally had all of our images together we put them on one laptop and started sorting through them to put them together in chronological order. The four of us decided to present the pictures how they appeared in the story. The order was difficult because none of us wanted to confuse anyone with our video. In the end it all came together.
The group and I are all satisfied with how the video turned out. Working with “A Rose for Emily” wasn’t that hard for me to do personally simply because it was one of the texts I wrote about for my final paper. It was nice to work with Eric, Michelle and Meagan. All seemed very nice people in class throughout this quarter so it was nice to know that I was going to work with them for this project. Despite the difficulties we encountered everyone in the group contributed greatly to the process making it an enjoyable experience.


Link to final media production on Youtube.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xenEseHCWY