By Jazmin Angel-Guzman

In our Japanese Plus 1-Inu class, we are wrapping up unit two – food! My group and I are the usagi group. The members of my group are Alexx, Kenny, and Angel. Our final task for the food unit is to make a video with our group of what we usually eat, or foods pertaining to specifically DC, and even American food. We decided to show breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the video to show the foods we eat at different times of day.

As for breakfast we went to IHOP, and we had our scripts with us. In addition, one member of my group and I had to share pancakes. It took several cuts to make the “cut,” because we wanted to get good scenes, so that it’ll show up in our video. For lunch we made spaghetti tacos. As for this idea, when we were thinking about lunch ideas, I remember mentioning spaghetti tacos from Icarly, a TV show on Nickelodeon, and boom, next thing you know we were going to make spaghetti tacos, at one of our member’s house. As for dinner we went to Boli’s Pizza to get a jumbo slice pizza after class on a Wednesday.

Initially, I was reluctant to even do this video project, because I’m not really good in videos, and because we had to speak in Japanese. Having a camera in front of me is not a beautiful picture. But seeing my group members with me, they encouraged me. For example, the video we have now wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for the amount of retakes we took. I consider myself playing a role in messing up, but simultaneously I was having fun.

One of the successful things that happened in the making of this video was that we finished earlier than the due date because we thought we only had like three days to do it. So we kind of did it consistently without many gaps in the process making.

One of the things this video project has taught me is that group work is important and that by working together you can produce something amazing that can blow your mind like it did mine.