Artist Statement

Artist Statement

Going into this course I was not aware of the service learning aspect of it and when the final project was introduced on the first day of class I was already dreading it. Fifteen hours, of what essentially to me seemed like community service, was assigned and I was hoping it wasn’t going to cut into my other class’ work load. I am taking 3 other film classes, one of them being a production course so I knew the work load in that class was going to be great. So that was my main basic reason for dreading it: the time consumption.

I have never done service learning before and when we found out we would be working with Kids Matter Inc. I thought we would be playing babysitter for kids for 15 hours. After further explanation and after the 3^rd assignment, in which we got to interview a foster parent, I found out that we were going to be able to take the project in anyway we wanted. The topics that the other students were working on: transitioning out, stereotypes in foster care, why become a foster parent etc didn’t really intrigue me and I don’t like doing what others are doing so I decided to focus on how to become a foster parent and more specifically concentrate on the training aspect of it. I was curious as to how they train people to become parents of potentially troubled kids.

I started my research on the Kids Matter website and looked at what they had under training. It didn’t say much, just a quick statement of what they cover, the hours needed and then a schedule of the upcoming sessions so I knew I would have to dig deeper and by that I mean I used Google! I typed in “Foster Care” and “Foster Care Training” and got a lot of information just on the first returned page. After compiling what I thought was relevant I decided to try the library which didn’t have much information on my topic. I thought this was going to be a problem with only using web sources and one hard copy booklet but I pressed on.

And then trouble strikes. It took awhile to get my interview set up because at first I wanted to get footage of an actual session in progress but Megan, the associate who works with Kids Matter and helped our class get interviews and such, told me that I wouldn’t be able to film a session but I would be able to sit in on one. I told her I would rather get an interview with somebody that had knowledge of training because at this time there was about a little less than 2 weeks left of the semester. So after waiting for a week I finally got my interview scheduled and filmed. After that I went straight home and uploaded my video to my computer and tried to edit it in my choice of editing software, Vegas, but again trouble struck. It didn’t recognize my video because it was an AVI and not a WAV or MPEG. So I searched and searched online for a converted and couldn’t find any free trials that didn’t put a watermark on my converted video. Finally Dale, the tech guy that helped us through technical problems, told me how to solve the problem and got my video edited and done with.

All in all it was a great experience, minus the technical difficulties. I learned that being a foster parent can be troublesome and that becoming a foster parent is a long process but I was inspired by the project and got to meet some admiring people. I love kids and think that they shine a much need innocent light onto this world.