We’re all for free speech, but we believe that its each citizens civic responsibility to make sure that their words have power. Our video is meant to illustrate the dangers of what can happen when the government begins to censor content. To do this, we combined various images of media being censored (eg. cd’s broken, books taken, chalkboards erased) loosely bound by an overall theme of channel surfing. As the video progresses, we being to censor not only the images, but the background sounds as well (quotes from famous speeches, student opinion) to create the effect that more and more rights are being taken away. By the end of the film, everything has been censored.
We felt that the idea of a “media collage” was very important in our video, because free speech isn’t just about oration…its about freedom of the press, freedom in music, and freedom of existence. Obviously, there will always be people out there who are going to say awful things under their “first amendment rights,” but the same idea that allows them to be offensive gives us the ability to combat their offensiveness. This is a process which the government should not be involved in.
iMovie was used to create this video, all images were original photos/clips taken by the creators. Thanks to Ashlesha Dhuri for acting as interviewee #1, as well as the great figures of the past (John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan) for lending us their words.
