If you go to New Orleans

Ok, brace yourself for a blog post that is only mildly motion graphics related but something I feel everyone should know. I’m not sure if any of you heard but last week the 5 (or 6?) police officers accused of murdering innocent civilians on a bridge in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina were finally charged. Although they were charged with wrongful use of a firearm and not murder and it took 7 years to finally prosecute them, better late than never I say. The killings of these innocent people are not the only things Katrina related that the government has taken more than too long to fix.

This past January I went down to New Orleans with a group of 17 other students for a week long service trip. Coming back from NOLA each of us was hoping to find a way to use our media skills to share with people in Ithaca what we learned about some of the many misconceptions of the disaster that occurred in August of 2005.  Hurricane Katrina was not what destroyed New Orleans, the storm actually past 5 miles South East of the city. The real damage, which caused up to 15 feet of water in some places, was caused by a failed Federal levy system. This levy system whose construction started in the late 1960’s, was only supposed to take 15 years to finish, instead they never finished. Because of the broken levies many areas were flooded, and while most of New Orleans has since been cleaned and repaired, areas of historically lower income, such as the Lower 9^th Ward, look as if the storm hit yesterday. I’ll leave it to you to form your own opinions about why this happened and what it means, but you can see how this could be seriously upsetting to many people. I and many of my friends who were on the trip with me, were very shaken by this. Myself and my good friend Connie Honeycutt decided to make a testimonial style video about what we learned down there. After learning how to use after effects I decided that it would also be beneficial to do a typography animation to go along at the end of the video, because sometimes reading the words yourself can be more effective than listening to someone talk. However, for some reason I can't get the video to upload on here so I am just going to pop it in the dropbox folder Arturo made. If you want to learn more about what really happened, come see me and Connie as well as 4 other friends present about what we learned and screen the entire video at the Whalen Symposium this upcoming Wednesday!