Planning A Movie

I've been sitting here all day thinking about how I want to approach the upcoming Digital Story Product that I have to do for this class. Having the topic of hunting already picked out, I am now forced to start entering the dirty work and the fine details. What types of things am I going to address in the video? How do I want it to look and sound? Because this subject is really important to me, I don't want to leave anything out or have this movie be a flop and not get my points across. Taking out a piece of paper, I started to map it all out. Movie-making methods and editing techniques aside, what did I want to include in the video? Ultimately, it comes down to four things: What hunting means to me, memories I have associated with it, the process and gear required, and the morality of the entire thing.

The first point, and probably most important to me, is definitely the most complex and the one I want to focus on throughout the piece. What is hunting to me? It's many things. It is a time to be close to the outdoors. You trek out into the darkness of early morning, plop yourself down among the trees, bugs, and fallen foliage. While the chill creeps into your bones from the temperature around you, you start out completely blind until the sun rises. All you can do is listen. You hear the scurrying of small animals and the buzzing of mosquitoes in your ear. You can hear the wind rustling through the leaves. Once the sun comes up, and everything is washed with light, you wait silently, and the only thing to do is look and listen. The spider in the grass across from you spins its web and you watch its progress throughout the day. The squirrels play with each other and scatter through the leaves and up the trees. You sit and see all the natural world around you, noticing things you would probably miss if you were just passing through. Hunting is a family tradition for me. My great grandparents and grandparents hunted, and I learned from my dad everything that they taught him. So much more knowledge than people realize goes into hunting. You learn about the gear you will need, the gear you should bring for emergencies, how to (properly) read a compass, to use and carry a weapon, how to track deer, and many more things. My favorite thing about hunting, however, is spending time with my dad. Obviously, hunting is also a source of food for my family, and I always look forward to my dad's delicious jerky.

I have so many memories revolving around being in the woods with my dad. This blog post would probably get pretty lengthy to tell them all, or even a few. I also want to save them to talk about them in my project. However, the other two things that I want to talk about in the movie are the process of hunting and the morality of it. There are bad hunters and good hunters. They are easily identified by the way they treat the sport, nature, other hunters, and the weapons they hold. I hope that when making this video, I can show people the difference. Some people will always be against hunting, but I am hoping I can at least get them to look at it a little differently.