Who I really am!

My name is Alex Sandeman, and I am a high school student from NSW, Australia. I bet you're wondering why I am "impersonating" a Vietnam Veteran. Well the reason behind this website is a major English project I am doing for school, called a "Personal Interest Project" or PIP. My year was tasked with coming up with a topic that we have an interest in, and expressing it in different and creative ways. I chose to review 5 Vietnam War movies and analyse them from the view of a US Vietnam Veteran, but in no way am I trying to impersonate a War Veteran, it was for Project purposes only.

 

Why?

So why did I decide to do this project? Like I said on the main page, I have an interest in movies, particularly war movies, and I have always enjoyed watching them. I wanted to find out more about the Vietnam War, and I had always wondered if the information that Hollywood was feeding us was true, so that was probably one of the main reasons for doing this project. Plus sitting down and watching movies, then writing about them afterwards isn't exactly boring for me! So I pretty much had the ideal project, finally one that I actually wanted to do, and it wasn't about to become a task that I had to slave over and wish I hadn't gotten it.

 

How the idea progressed...

When we first got the assignment, we were given some time to think up of ideas in class. I made a list of my interests, which included entertainment (movies). I then thought up of things that I could do for each one of them, I knew I wanted to make a website, but I can't have a website with nothing on it, can I? On my piece of paper it said "Movies - Movie Reviews" which was one of my ideas. I looked at the rest of them then I made the decision that this one had the most potential. This led to another decision, If I just had a bunch of movie reviews shoved on a website, that wouldn't get me very high marks, I needed it to have direction, it needed genre. I wrote a list of all the different genres that I could have my movie reviews on, and decided on War, in particular the Vietnam War. So it was decided, I was going to review Vietnam War Movies, then when I consulted my teacher about it, she suggested that I perhaps write it from the view of an actual Vietnam Veteran, and compare the movies to real life Vietnam experiences etc. So I decided to take it from there, I started to think up of extra ideas, the movies I was going to review, and my community consultations etc. and it kicked off from there.

 

 

Finally...

This project is one of the best projects that I have ever had to do, and I daresay I will never have a project that I enjoy completing again. It allows for freedom in a students work, there are no set limits (apart from the obvious ones that must be set in place in order for a student to pass) and people actually get to express something that they have an interest in.