For the Love of the game

Assignment/Activity Title— For the love of the game C-SPAN Documentary

Year— Sophomore

Skill— Writing, Media, Research

Portfolio Category— Critical Reasoning

           

            For my C-SPAN documentary I worked with Elizabeth and Ben and we decided to focus on bills that protect student athletes from concussions. We decided to do this project because me and Elizabeth are both athletes and this was a topic that we felt connected to us and a topic in which we felt we could focus on for months and still be interested in.

            Our first step was to do individual research on what bills had to do with concussion safety, we found quite a few so we had to narrow it down to one, which we chose by deciding which was most important to our lives. Next we had to do research and search for interviews. There was a ton of information on concussions and the impact that they have on people, especially following all of the scrutiny that the NFL has been under after a lawsuit from old players regarding the impact concussions have had on their life. Having too much information was often a problem for us because there was so much that we wanted to add to our film, there were so many different perspectives to include.

            Then we reached out to several people for interviews. We sent out lots of interview requests, and were able to get an interview with Ms. Boule and a doctor from Children’s National, who is the head neurologist. We were also able to get a personal narrative from one of my friends who has suffered from multiple concussions.

            To me writing the script was the hardest part, we had to condense all of the information, pick out the points we wanted to illustrate, then we also had to connect it to ourselves. We decided to include ourselves in the documentary because we felt like it would give the documentary a more personal feel.

            I think that this project shows my strength in communicating a message, especially in video format. I want to include this in my portfolio because I think it shows how I can communicate a message in more than one way and I think that it is very important to be able to use different mediums for communication.