Visions of Gotham: Topics in NYC from 1945 to Present

Creative Process

May 13th, 2009

Why Did We Choose Our Topic?

Interestingly enough, we started this project thinking we would research the anti-war movement in response to the Vietnam War. However, we quickly changed topics once we started learning about Vietnam War veterans and their stories about returning back home. This topic really interested us, so we decided to focus on the different elements that affected these veterans in their attempt to reintegrate back into New York City life after going through the unique war experience. We came up with our main idea that Vietnam veterans shared a unique common war experience which isolated them from other New Yorkers when they returned home to New York City, as no one else could understand what they had gone through. As a result, the veterans formed their own population and repeopled New York City with their return home. Once we came up with this idea, we moved forward with researching, planning out, and finally producing our documentary.

Research

First, we obviously had to research our field of interest. One of the first places we visited was the Brooklyn Historical Society. It has an oral history exhibit, created by Professor Napoli, on Vietnam War veterans and their stories. We visited BHS several times to learn more about veterans and their experiences, and we even conducted an interview there. More importantly, we were able to get in touch with Vietnam veterans based on our research at BHS, and the subsequent interviews spawned from this discovery really are the core of our documentary.

We thought the best way to get information for our project was to talk to New York City Vietnam veterans themselves and gain insight into their reassimilation process back home through various interviews. Professor Napoli got us in touch with the four veterans featured in our documentary, which was a huge help! We spent between 40 minutes and an hour and a half with each interviewee talking to them about their experiences in the war and the subsequent return home, all the while filming the entire conversation with our very useful Flip Videos.

We decided to look at the factors from the Vietnam War that affected veterans, formed their common shared war experience, and impacted their return back to NYC. Obviously PTSD stands out as one of the factors, but we were also interested in Agent Orange and the physical effects it produced in the body. The newspaper article by John Hamill also talks about Agent Orange and how it further demonstrated that Vietnam vets were essentially forgotten by society and the government.

We also wanted to look at the ways Vietnam vets coped with the return home, like Joe with his surfing and working out habit (shown in our documentary), and how he started writing about his war experiences many years later. Some of his works can be found on his biography page. We felt it was important to include the coping outlets each veteran used in order to show how they succeeded in re-integrating themselves back home in New York City.

Creating the Documentary

After completing the four interviews, the final long, arduous task lay ahead of us…the creation of our documentary video. None of us really expected that a single 19 minute documentary film would take so much time and energy to create and perfect! We spent many many weeks putting this entire documentary plus the website together. Numerous pieces of paper and even napkins full of messy handwriting were used in order to create our storyboard, the most important organizational tool of our movie. We can’t even count the number of hours that were put into the creation of this video, as each directorial choice for pictures and music was crucial in conveying the overall message of our film. Additionally, we had to work with the serious real-world constraints of copyright, so we couldn’t use more than 30 seconds of any external video or music file. This proved to be one of the main hurdles we had to overcome with this project. Working with technology was also a challenge at first, but we’d like to think that we’re now full-fledged experts at iMovie!

Our goal with this video was to present all these interviews in a cohesive manner, with facts and information in between, to illustrate the repeopling of Vietnam veterans back into New York City. We hope you get a better understanding of our topic from all the time and effort we’ve spent in creating this website and documentary!