Building Your Stack

Today, we continued to research and organize our synthesis for our senior papers. At the beginning of class, Mr. Rivers gave us all a note card. On this notecard, we were to write down both our film and academic evidence that we want to talk about in our papers. Mr. Rivers suggests that you use as many cards as you can to build up your stack and to have a larger bank of information and evidence to use in your synthesis papers. Rivers suggested that we format them as follows:
        Side 1: Cinematic evidence, including choices, themes, symbols, and scenes you want to discuss in your paper
        Slide 2: Academic evidence, such as direct quotes/statistics, argument/claim or discovery that supports your cinematic evidence

For my paper, I am synthesizing the film The Day After Tomorrow (2004) to the academic lens of abrupt climate change. While these two things are very much connected, I am finding myself struggling to organize it all since there is so much to talk about in the film. Since there is so much, I decided to follow a structure we have done before: The three-act structure. I am going to use this structure sort of like a guide, talking about each of the major sequences in the structure, such as the cinematic choices in the film, and then synthesizing each of them with my academic lense.

Today, I completed one of the notecards that Rivers suggested that we create to organize our evidence, both cinematic and academic. On the cinematic side, I chose to include a quote from the film, then for the academic side, I found evidence from one of my sources that directly support the quote, which makes it very easy to synthesize them together. Hopefully, as I continue to organize and research, I can start to make more of these flashcards.

This weekend, I plan on rewatching the film in order to refresh my mind on certain aspects of the film, and I suggest that you do the same. Rewatching the film may help you to find additional evidence for your synthesis or may spark an interest to write about a different aspect of the film, such as character choice or the special effects if you are not already writing about them. I would also suggest that you organize your paper before you start writing; it makes it a lot easier if you know what you're going to write about.

Next week, we will continue to work independently to research and write our synthesis papers.