The Book
First thing’s first: This is one of the best books I’ve ever read. It has a great plot, fleshed out characters, and the story it tells seems believable. My only real critiscism would be the pacing; the story seems to move too fast, then it slows down, than repeats the cycle one more time. You’ll get used to it, then the cycle shifts and you’re struggling to keep up or it’s moving unbearably slow and you almost lose interest.
Almost.
Some of the characters [Dally] seem a little cliche to me, but that’s to be expected in a story that has so many characters. Right from chapter 1 S.E. Hinton goes out of her way to describe the characters completely, from their shoe size to what they had for breakfast. I can’t tell if it’s a bad thing or not because it can go both ways. On one side it feels good to get all that out of the way and focus on story telling, but digesting all that info is a little bit much. Dispite all this, everybody can find a character to relate to in this book, the cast is that diverse.
The Movie
The movie doesn’t come close to the book. With the book we get enough information to actually care about what happens to the characters, but the movie whizzes by too fast to for character development. I couldn’t really get into it. Lots of parts are skipped as well; we go straight from Dally dieing to Ponyboy sitting at his desk reading the note Johnny left him. We miss all the parts inbetween it, like the three brothers making up, Pony doing bad in school, and Ponyboy threatening to cut those Socs. Plenty more was skipped, but that was the most significant alteration. However, all the characters are there, being played by some significant actors like
Tom Cruise. Aside from the fellow who played Pony looking
RIGHT AT THE SCREEN in the scene at the movies, it was done well. The special effects like the red haze are cheezy, but the movie is old so I can’t expect Transformers-quality special effects. The actors really get into the characters and they sound like I imagined they would. When I was reading the Outsiders I was expecting the movie to be a bit grittier, harsher looking then they made it out to be. But again, this is an old movie. It may be old but it still doesn’t do this book justice.
That’s the thing about movies: we go to them to give our minds some time off. We can’t be weighed down with all the details that novels give us. We go there to watch some simple entertainment, eat stale popcorn, and go home. Two hours or so isn’t long enough for a book of this magnitude.
The Project
This was my first collaboration with someone I don’t know personally I’ve ever done, and my second time using Voicethread… It was all new to me. Working with Devon, Francis, Estuardo, and Anthony was fun. they worked hard and all of us pulled our own weight. I’m suprised no one procrastinated (Except maybe Devon a little :P). I had no troubles on my end, but I know Devon had audio problems. The only difficulty was keeping in touch with them. Whenever I’d be on Meebo they’d be off, and vice versa. We never had many IM conversations, so most of our networking took place right on the
wikispaces page and through emails. I felt we should’ve gone a little more in depth with the comments, but Voicethread only lets us record so much before it takes an obscenely long time to load. We did great, really. Why did we use Voicethread as our form of representation? It’s because we all have experience with it, it’s easy to use, and it’s easily accessable by all of us, thanks to our two classes having a shared account. It suited our needs and was relatively stable. Mostly, we used it because it was practically already there for us and we took the road of least resistance. :cD
The process varied from person to person. I, for example, finished it and got it out of the way early because I hate knowing I left something unfinished and I had pictures to represent friendship at home. Now Devon took longer because he had to find Creative Commons pictures on Flickr to represent friendship which was harder than he thought it would be. Francis, Estuardo, and Anthony used both pictures from Flickr and their own effectively, and according to them they had little trouble. When all our work was deleted by accident they were the first to get their parts back up and notify us. The final project turned out well, and it wasn’t hard if we just sat down and put some effort into it.
