Recently, an on-campus smoking ban has started an uproar of opinions between two sides of people—those in favor of, and those who are against the ban. Those who favor the ban, usually consider smoking to be an infringement on the rights of non-smokers to breathe clean air. On the opposite side of the spectrum, those who are against the ban usually consider it to be an infringement on their rights to smoke. While some people are very opinionated about the issue, there are naturally those who choose to remain neutral. Of course, their neutrality excludes them from a classified group, as their apathy does not bring any say to the matter. For the sample who opined, we have documented them in the form of a video essay, with the intention of portraying the public opinion on smoking within the University of Florida’s population.
Link to Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFcY_H9vHaI&feature=player_embedded
We chose to shoot our video the way we did so we could express the opinions on both sides of the argument on the smoke free campus rule. By using video rather than still images, we were able to get the full effect of how each person felt in their interview about the subject because the viewer can see their facial expressions when they talked and hear their vocal intonations. We targeted the University of Florida’s campus as our setting so we could collect our interviews from the University of Florida’s population. We targeted this group because they are the ones affected by the new smoking ban. Also, by choosing the environment we did, we were able to show University of Florida faculty and students in their natural setting, walking to class or studying. This allowed our audience to identify themselves with the video and the subjects being interviewed, and therefore see their own opinions reflected throughout the clip. We selected a variety of interviewees, including professors and both undergraduate and graduate students in order to make our video diverse and as non-biased as possible. Finally, when filming the subjects, we chose to use a medium close-up, a frame that only includes a person’s head, shoulders, and mid-body. This allowed the shot to include the background but still maintain focus on what the person is saying since we wanted an audio instead of a visual focus.
Another unique thing we did with our interviews was interviewing a UPD officer. He probably had the most interesting interview for several reasons: When we asked him what he thought about the smoking ban on UF’s campus he obviously hesitated in giving his true opinion on the matter since he was in uniform; he still gave his true opinion though just in a less harsh way. After the interview we joked about his answer to that question and he told us that he would have a different answer if he was out of uniform. The other part that made his interview very interesting was that we were able to ask him an additional question, “what is the UFPD doing to enforce the ban on smoking?” His answer to this question was very insightful because it made us aware that it is not really a ban on smoking as much as it is a rule against it and therefore it cannot be enforced by law. We chose to leave his answers more intact than the others because we felt that his hesitation to the third question revealed the most about what he truly thought about the ban.
In order to get the most information from our interviewees we devised a strategy for what kind of questions to ask and how to ask them. The questions used in our interviews started off broad then got more in depth. We did this to give the audience a background on the people whose opinions we were presenting in the video. The interviewees’ responses to the first three questions are reasons that lead up to their final response. Most of them are explanations as to why that person feels the way they do about the ban. For instance, most people who do not smoke are glad that the ban was implemented and like the idea of a smoke free campus. With these questions we were able to talk about smoking in general as well as the University of Florida smoking ban, which is the matter we wanted to discuss in our video essay. Everything we wanted to portray and accomplish was done by the interviewees’ genuine responses. We were not looking for a particular answer but yet all answers. We also tried not to preface our interview with any information on what the interview was about so that we could get more genuine answers, particularly to the first question.
When editing the video, we considered the answers given to us by those being interviewed and picked out the ones that portrayed the strongest, most detailed opinions. Some people did not give us clear, rational answers -- such as, “I just don’t like it,” so we usually found it necessary to exclude some of this footage. By doing so, we might have altered the effect that the video had on the viewer, hopefully intensifying its effects. We may have also added a bias, because we are only showing the polar opposites and may neglect some more of the middle ground. We also cropped each person’s responses and arranged them in a way so that all answers to the same question appeared in the video grouped together. Our montage of answers keeps the video concise and its message clear and straight to the point.
After carrying out our miniature version of a social experiment, we learned that most people believe that the on-campus smoking ban had good intentions but was ineffective. As it is not a law, but a rule, there is nothing that could be done to enforce it, and neither the repercussions that not following it entails. Unlike marijuana smoking, which there is a law against and therefore you can get arrested for getting caught doing, there are no consequences for smoking cigarettes on campus. The worst that could happen is being told to put the cigarette out just like if you were told that there is no eating in classrooms, another UF rule. Overall, this project changed our perspective on the smoking ban and its credibility. What first began as an attempt to portray people’s opinions on an issue, ended up teaching us more about the issue and the people themselves. If we had chosen a different type of media for our visual representation of the argument, our project would not have been as effective.
