Final: It's A Living

Strong Language Warning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s6h6DKpzhI&feature=youtu.be

 An abridged version of the full video


It's A Living is a project to help the voice of people on the low end of the economic totem pole to be heard by the masses. In this video, I interview Moses Leiva, a Bayonne resident with a sailor's mouth working as a janitor, and his experiences. Spending most of his life close to the thresh hold of poverty, Moses has spent the last year living with his fiancee's family after being evicted from his home.

Though my original plan for this project was to make a single video featuring many interviewees I soon realized a single video is very limiting. I felt the project would be better realized as a continued series, talking to people in the vein of a portrait documentary short covering the subjects I brought up in my project proposal , such as minimum wage, poverty and welfare.

Since each video would be focused on one person, it would allow more flexibility to interact with them and allow them to speak. Taking this further, the production values could expand, such as following the subjects in their day to day life(something I wanted to do with Moses but his employer refused to let me record him at his work) and a use of After Effect to make more dynamic video presentations along the lines of a video you would find on Buzzfeed(I have no access to After Effect so that's off the table for now).

Having a specific goal in mind with the series also allows me to really focus in on a social problem and using convergence culture to spread the knowledge. Moses was a great first subject for the project because of how knowledgeable on the subject he is(I had no idea there were so many PhDs in poverty, for example) while he also knew about a lot of the sources I brought up below. I believe there is a lot of room for this project to grow from here, to spread awareness of economic problems from the perspective of people who are not always heard.

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2015/12/ST_2015-12-09_middle-class-05.png

Reich, Robert. "The Morality of a $15 Minimum." Robert Reich (). N.p., 19 Oct. 2015. Web. 17 Dec. 2015. <http://robertreich.org/post/131476708345>.

"UC Davis Center for Poverty Research." Who Are the Working Poor? -. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Dec. 2015. <http://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/who-are-working-poor>.

Parlapiano, Alicia, Robert Gebeloff, and Shan Carter. "The Shrinking American Middle Class." The New York Times. The New York Times, 24 Jan. 2015. Web. 17 Dec. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/01/25/upshot/shrinking-middle-class.html?_r=0>.

"Minimum Wage since 1938." CNNMoney. Cable News Network, n.d. Web. 17 Dec. 2015. <http://money.cnn.com/interactive/economy/minimum-wage-since-1938/>.

"Minimum Wage Mythbusters." - U.S. Department of Labor. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Dec. 2015. <http://www.dol.gov/minwage/mythbuster.htm>.

"Living Wage NYC." Living Wage NYC. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Dec. 2015. <http://www.livingwagenyc.org/pagedetail.php?id=3>.

"The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground." Pew Research Centers Social Demographic Trends Project RSS. N.p., 09 Dec. 2015. Web. 17 Dec. 2015. <http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/>.