My Kind of Paradise

When this project was assigned, I had no idea where to start. The thought of going down the list of the rubric and naming off the 20 voices in front of a camera didn't seem like an accurate representation of how my view of the world has changed. So I decided to take it a little bit further, tell it as more of a story. Because like Edward Bloom said in Big Fish (It's what I do! I tell stories!) And while he wasn't referring to a video for a Humanities final, the magic and wonder that he put into his stories kind of became the foundation for what I wanted this video to be. My view of the world at the beginning of the year was more like a view of my school. I was mainly focused on schoolwork, acting, singing, and working on video production. Then came the cultural elements, seven of them to be exact, all coming with at least four different cultures of the world. Immediately I began to see just how narrow and single storied my view of the world was. I began getting new perspectives of cultures that I would've never guessed before. The stories we read in class were one of the biggest windows to these cultures. I learned about the values of friendship and loyalty in The Kite Runner through Amir and Hassan's relationship, the mystery and magic that Antonio found when trying to uncover his destiny in Bless Me Ultima, and the search for beauty in the midst of war, sickness, and death in The Samurai's Garden. All of these stories were exaggerations of the culture they came from, but they were a good gateway into some of the real life values. And these traits carried over to other things too. Hotel Rwanda showed the overwhelming devotion of the hotel owner trying to protect his family and his people as they all took refuge. The same devotion was shown in the movie Gandhi as he tried to end the British colonization in India, and gain Indian independence. (You don't think we're just going to walk out of India? Yes. In the end, you will walk out.) Both of these stories emphasize these hero's journeys as they eventually reach their goals through their hardships. Not all of these stories were about heroic journeys through war times. Some, in fact were just about overcoming an obstacle, be it big or small. In some cultures overcoming an obstacle decided whether or not you would be accepted into society as an adult or not. Children of Heaven had the simple obstacle of trying to get some new shoes for his little sister so she could go to school. The building of the Panama Canal had the obstacle of a few hundred miles of land between their goal of connecting two oceans. On a more local scale, during the Economic Summit, we had to overcome the scarcity of resources to improve the standard of living, while in God Grew Tired of Us, the Lost Boys had to adapt to a whole new lifestyle altogether. Of course, there are always people who look for reasons for these differences despite the similar themes. Jarred Diamond in Guns Germs and Steel had a bit of a theory, but there were still some questions left. And maybe like in Romeo and Juliet, it'll take a great tragedy to resolve those differences, or maybe it'll take the leadership of one of us to resolve them. But sometimes, like Anthony Bourdain showed us, it's best to look past the single story and just take in these differences. Even with a laid back approach to this boat-load of information, there's still a lot to take in. My theory is that part of the reason people chose to believe the single story is because they're not aware of all of this information. And even if they are educated, it all seems to pile up in an overwhelming way. But that's where my symbol comes in. This lens that I've been using can get really close up to something. It'll give a detailed picture of that object from far away, but we don't see anything around it. As the lens zooms out and gives a wider picture, more information is given telling the viewer more about the object. Sometimes the wider picture is overwhelming for the viewer, so they choose to see only the simple, close up shot; the single story. But by seeing this way, it's easy to miss things, beautiful things, magical things in life. This is what this whole year was trying to convey: that (when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.) That's what I wanted to try and capture in this video...my view of the world...my kind of paradise.