History of Immigration to America

I wanted to research about some important events about immigration to America. 

The immigration patterns of people coming to America can be categorized in waves. These waves can occur due a certain group of people migrating, new government regulations, and changes in the American lifestyle. I will organize my research in a timeline format, specific to when certain regions of people starting coming to the United States

1849-1850: The first Irish and German Immigrants come to the United States. They came to escape extreme prejudice and discrimination, with the hope of having religious and personal freedom. 

1880-1891: The Chinese Exclusion Act drastically reduced the number of Asian people coming to the United States. They began coming in the 1850's, due to economic hardships during a civil war. 

1892: Ellis Island opens, helping more that 1 million people immigrate to the United States. 

1907: The Gentleman's agreement was made, which prevented Japanese people from coming to the United States. They came starting in the 1880's.

1917-1924: The Immigration Act of 1917 and 1924 limited the amount of Asian people and general immigrates coming to the area. The acts created a literacy test for people coming into the country, and limited the number of national quotas respectively. 

1942: People from Mexico were used as agricultural workers, to cater to labor shortages happening in World War II. 

1952: The Asian Exclusion Act ended, which allowed more Asians to immigrate to the United States again. 

This researched covered most of the major continents, and highlighted some of the laws that were in place that affected immigration of specific people. I am not sure if we will use all this information, but I know events that increased or decrease immigration of a certain people should be focused on. This will provide context to how long a certain group of people have been in America, and how their collective identity has formed. I will have another blog post from 1950-2020 immigrations patterns, in order to find out more significant events of mass immigration. 

Script for First Part of our Documetary

This will be a quick post. 

From our previous meeting, we have decided to create a script for our first part of our documentary. This part will cover the history of immigration to America. This does technical start in the 1600's, with Pilgrims came seeking religious freedom. Though, I think we should start from the 1850-1890's, during the colonial era. People came to United States, with the hope of having greater economic opportunity, which the United States associated later as the "land of opportunity". 

This segment will involve Colin or/and I narrating this history. We want to establish these voiceovers first, because we want to make sure the proper context is established when completing our script. If this is not done, our topic can become a bit confusing to understand, or may seem poorly supported. We will plan to develop our script this week, and work on recording next week. In terms of visuals, we need to start looking for archived footage. Some significant footage to put would be major immigrations events: Ellis Island, Y2K Movement, Angel Island, and much more. We will start looking into that, and finalize specific events we want to cover that are representative of every continent. I will post about it in my next weeks blog posts. 

Interview Questions

Today we discussed the questions we would ask our interviewees. 

We wanted these questions to cover what the Generation Z experience is, learning, associating, and understanding their culture and heritage. Our interviewees would teenagers and young adults, that were born in between 1997-2015. One effect of this is our interview subjects may not have a personal migration experience to America; They could have been born in America. Therefore, interviewees can highlight their parents experiences in the interview, that we would supplement with graphics. and music. Our questions highlight their parents/ personal experience, and show how it is made an impact on their perception of culture and tradition. In terms of interviewees, most of them would need to highlight their parents experience, but some will have their own experience to base their answers on. 

Below are the questions we plan to ask

These questions will allow us to hone in on some common themes of culture and tradition that exist between all our interviewees. Currently, we are planning to gauge the answers of our interviewees, to come up with the "human connection" or further analysis part of the documentary we planned for. We know the topics we want to cover is stereotyping, Americanization, cultural homogenization, and overall development of self. These themes will be further developed when hearing what our interviewees have to say. There will be a blog post happening soon. 

Genre and Target Audience

Based on previous posts, I wanted to re- iterate what our genre and target audiences is. 

Based on the research I have done, my understanding of these two topics is more informed and should be clarified for future reference. 

Our genre for our piece is a cultural documentary series. We will have an expository format, narrating through the topics in the series, using archived footage and various graphics. Our topic is something that is educational, addressing the experience of living in America, and learning a culture of a different continent. We intend to use interviewees from across the world, to create representation that matches our target audience, being Generation Z. Our target audience are considered the most multi-cultural people in the world, and would have some relation to the topic at hand. They are learning culture from mediums such as media, technology, and their family. Therefore, there are aspects of cultural homogenization and Americanization, that are unique to their cultural experience. Therefore, this target audience and topic direction would be the most impactful for our series, and would provide a greater educational aspect to the excerpt we are completing. 

Next week, we will finalize our interviewee questions and start our Zoom interviews. Also, we will plan to create a script for our narration, in order to stay on topic in our excerpt. 

Week 3 Meeting: Excerpt Structure and Representation

In addition to establishing our documentary series structure, we made a structure to follow for our excerpt. 

Episode 1: This is America

1) History of Immigration

2) Interviewee experience of immigrating to America

3) Unique experiences linking back to common human condition

Our structure starts with the history of how people immigrated to America. We believed we needed to cover this because it indicates the beginning of multiple cultures of people existing in America. Therefore, our topic would not make sense without providing this context. We plan to use archived footage of certain times when migrating to America was popular. We would supplement this with voiceovers, based on a prepared script. This part would take up 2 minutes, including a short 45 second introduction segment. As clarified before, Colin and I are not the main focus of the documentary, but we plan to share the narrating role throughout the excerpt. 

The second part would involve multiple interviewees, who will speak about the process of immigration. Since our target audience is Generation Z, we would include people of that age bracket, that are multi- cultural, to be our interviewees, In the case of the immigration experience, the interviewee is not required to have actual experienced this, but will refer to their parents experiences. We can use there responses, to introduce how that has shaped there cultural experience, being raised in America. We are lucky to know people who originate from most continents in the world, so we will be able to have a diverse cultural representation. Further in our meetings, we realized the importance of this because our series is meant to target most of Generation Z. Therefore, our interviewee choices need to reflect who our audience are culturally, to a good degree. 

The last part of the documentary is contingent on our interviewees responses. What we are planning to do is analyze what our interviewees said, and reveal the positives or negatives related to their responses. We would be able to plan this out better when understanding what our interviewees said. We have prepared questions that do not focus on one specific topic, because we want to keep the conversation topic as broad as possible. Therefore, we have kept our third topic as mentioned, which will take about 1-1.5 minutes. As we prepared our questions, which will be featured in a couple of posts, we will work to figure how specific we want to get. We will continue to research more about certain early migrations to America, in order to reveal a more specific human condition shared between all our interviewees. 

And More Research!

The second documentary I researched was Headspace: Guide to Meditation. 

I chose this particular documentary because it had a structure that Colin and I wanted to have in our piece. The documentary established the concept of meditation, showed how it has changed the narrators perspective, and provided an opportunity to practice meditation. Also, the length of the documentary was 20 minutes, which correctly matches what are target audiences(Generation Z) desire in a production. In terms of the organization of episodes, it identifies mediation, certain parts that relate to meditation, and how to achieve limitless potential. This is a similar structure we want have in our piece. We want to have an episode defining culture. After, we would have various examples of how to learn and maintain culture in their lives. Lastly, we would put this together, and show how the dual culture experience affects their lives. 

I watched the first episode of the series, because it emulated the structure we wanted to have in our documentary. It started with an introduction from the main narrator, and how they were introduced to meditation. Also, he introduces the concept of meditation, and how versatile the experience can be for people. In our documentary, we intend to establish some context about the experience of learning culture from a different country. This context would include how people around the world moved to America, and the different experiences that exist. In the documentary, the speaker then speaks about the application of meditation, and provides the viewer some time to engage in meditation. In our future episodes, we plan to cover ways to apply and learn culture, such as technology, art, and food. Lastly, the documentary circles back to the concept of meditation, and reveals some positive effects of the activity. In our documentary, we want to end our episodes with an analysis of certain parts of learning culture, and what are the best ways to do so. We still need to discuss about this part of the documentary. 

Social Media Page

This douc- series also has a social media page. This page features various graphics, videos, and features related to the series. The post provide advice and motivation. They feature specific people, who have contributed to the meditation field or demonstrating specific meditation techniques. The consistent use of animation and graphics gave a whimsical and lighthearted feel to the social media page. This translates well to the actual documentary, which has a similar lighthearted tone. This tone is also displayed through the variety of colors. 

For our social media page, the use of varied color would create an inclusive color scheme. This would fit our target audience of multi- cultural Generation Z. Also, we create an "inclusive: social media page by including graphics, representing different cultures around the world. This can be the flags, clothing, or famous places. Integrating those graphics in our social media posts would serve as a perfect marketing tool for our target audience. 

Group Meeting Week 3: Planning the Series

This week, we decided to meet on Tuesday and Wednesday. We met over video call, to make more progress on our project, and reach our schedule goals. 

One part of the project we discussed were the structure of the episodes. From our previous conversations, we wanted to keep our series only 5 episodes. We already decided to use "Technology/Media", "Art", and "Food" as own episodes. We thought this would follow our concept, relation to person, and application structure we established in previous meetings. We wanted to introduce the concept of learning culture and heritage in a different country, apply this concept to existing people, and provide examples of how culture can be learned. Therefore, the aforementioned episodes would be great examples of how certain mediums can teach people aspects of their heritage, and the benefits and drawbacks from using those mediums. 

Taking our concept into account, we needed to identify what the next two episodes would be. Through further discussion, we decided on the structure mentioned below. 

Title: ____________ American

                            1) This is America                                            3) Art 

                            2) Technology and Media                                4) Food 

                                                      5) The ___________ Experience

The first episode would establish the context regarding people migrating to America. We would cover The second, third, and fourth episode would provide examples of how to maintain culture. The final episode would deal with all parts of dual culture experience, being American and another culture. This would encompass what was spoken in the previous episodes, to create a conclusion to the multi- cultural American experience. Additionally, we used the blank in the title and the fifth episode name to include a diverse Generation Z audience. Our series is not specific to any culture, and includes an experience that many people can relate too.