1F Final SAPSA: Not Your Narrative-Learning Through Other Lenses

Alice Kuang
Camille Abutin
Gabriel Cenizal
Section A01
6/5/17

Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1VCSygc3C4LaYq3sOWBiudKQCzqDZhkPKB5NR00ui3BI/edit?usp=sharing

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB8XoKeXViM

Our SAPSA project aims to shed light on the different narratives and perspectives of the Filipino identity and Filipino American Identity. The intended audience of our project are students K-12 or college level in hopes of enlightening them and helping them step back from American nationalist views and to encourage them to understand other societal norms and values from different cultural lenses. By using a highly controversial subject like President Duterte of the Philippines, our project highlights the Filipino American views vs Filipino views of him. To give context, President Duterte has gained a lot of criticism from the U.S. due to his violent war on drugs. Many Americans, including Filipino Americans, see Duterte as a villain and frequently use his presumed involvement in extrajudicial killings and vulgar mouth to set him in a bad light. On the other hand, the people of the Philippines show very high approval ratings for him. With that said, by using these altering points of views on President Duterte, we can begin to educate others on the importance of understanding different cultural and societal norms and how these different understandings contribute to the value of truth and empathy when it comes to our people.

As a group, we felt that giving our audiences authentic testimonies about their views on President Duterte made us successful in our goal. A couple of challenges we had was that we could not implement more background information about the subject in the video due to the time and none of our members had that much experience with video editing so there was a fairly large learning curve in the making of the video. Additionally we knew our audience was comprised of a younger generation, so we tried our best to make our video somewhat engaging by using a “draw my life” format in some of the video. If we could do anything differently, it would have been to draw out the “draw my life” portion first then narrate over it so that it’s a bit more aligned with the voiceover and gathered more testimonial content regarding why there’s such a difference in perspectives in Duterte. In many of the testimonials we had, the differences were explained merely as “It’s different here than it is in the Philippines,” although it is a valid statement, we feel as though our viewers should be given a more definite reason.

There is a lot of complexity in our SAPSA video, and we believe that the possibility of it becoming a video series in the future would be a great way of making the goal of our project more relatable and accessible to students of different ethnic backgrounds. In the video series, each video could highlight different controversial subjects in Asia and the Asian vs Asian American perspectives on it could be mentioned. We believe the future of our SAPSA is bright. Although we were not able to give a lot within five minutes, there is still more to learn and be told. By addressing the topic, we can only hope that others instill within themselves the information and critically analyze to better understand different political facets outside of what they only know.