Homelessness in America: Learn the Truth

Here is the final version of my parody video made about the ignorant views some people have about the homeless in the United States. The intended audience this video is trying to reach are those who have ignorant opinions about the homeless and young kids who have yet to form an opinion about the homeless.  

The video is encouraging these people to learn the real truth about the homeless by going to a popular homelessness website called: homeaid.org. Well here it is:

Tutorial for Unit 3

Here is my tutorial for my Unit 3 project. It is told in an address by President Obama.

Homelessness Xtranormal: Demo Draft

Homelessness Xtranormal: First Draft

Screenplay: Read and Respond

The excerpt written on how to write a successful screenplay was very helpful. I feel like I would definitely like to move my story in the direction of a short movie if I have the resources to do so.

Even if I do not decide to take my homelessness story in the direction of a screenplay, the reading was still very helpful. I think the two most important takeaways from the reading was the explanation of how to write visually and the description of a successful conflict.

The reading taught me that if I decide to write for a "movie" medium that I should not only write what my characters are saying but I must set the entire scene. This is a very challenging type of writing. That said, if I can successfully show my story without just coming out and telling my story it could be much more effective.

The second and most important takeaway from this article is to write a story that has conflict. Not only conflict, but conflict that people care about. I think that if I go down this route I will have to alter my story to have a stronger conflict for it to succeed in this medium.

So far, I am in the process of deciding whether or not to use imovie or  xtranormal. Either way, the reading on screenplay writing will help me to better tell my story through the visual narrative medium.

Zimmer Twins

Today in the Multimedia Writing class we looked at another animation tool somewhat similar to Xttranormal. It is called Zimmer Twins. Here is a quick project I made on the Zimmer Twins website about my favorite cereal.

Other Homlessness Stories

Here are some other multimedia stories concerning Homelessness:

This here is a pretty cool video that goes out into the community to get real voices of homeless people. As she says it, she is giving the homeless people in America a voice.



I enjoyed this next video because it does a great job of evoking emotion through music, photos and facts. It persuades audiences to feel sympathy for people that are less fortunate then they are.




Here is a link to another story done on CBS News. com. I thought this was very cool because it is talking to a man that is actually making an effort to bring the issue of homelessness to the main stream. His blog is called invisiblepeople.tv and it also has a lot of great information and use of multimedia concerning my topic of interest.

The blog uses video to give people insight on how individuals across the country are dealing with homelessness. By talking to "real people", it gives the site more credibility and it gives it a more personal feel.

This use of multimedia makes the site not only more interesting but more effective than just spouting statistics about the homeless. Invisible people tv uses blogging, twitter, facebook, and youtube all to tell this story.

Whether or not you care about this issue, this blog is still really cool and unique.

This last video is another presentation, but I like it because it takes a look at a specific demographic of America's homeless population...children.