Introduction

Our goal in doing this project was to analyze and identify how the media depicts certain events, people and issues in a film. The film we chose was "The Laramie Project" directed by Moises Kaufman. It is about a 21 year old college student, Matthew Shepard, who was beaten and murdered because he was gay. Kaufman did a fabulous job with the film but not all of the events were included or correct. We tore the movie apart as well as researched what really happened and compared the two types of media to determine what is truth and what is "truthiness." We took the New York Times as our main source of truth but also included other media to assure our findings.

Each member of the group took a different section to work on. Ryan did the editing both the blog and film, filming, and interviewing. He also found many inspiring video clips to put on our blog. Chalyse researched what events were true and how it was covered in the New York Times as well as in other media. She also looked up information on Matthew Shepard, the director of the film, Moises Kaufman, and vocabulary. Cheyenne looked and examined "The Laramie Project" film and analyzed it for things that were added or taken out. Chalyse and Cheyenne compared their findings. Finally, Jay covered the framing, and the themes in both the movie and news coverage (truth vs. "truthiness"). As a group, we filmed our conclusion discussing our findings and how the media alters film to make the movie more interesting, intriguing, and timely.

Below is the movie trailer for "The Laramie Project." We added this because we felt that the movie was different than we expected so we want everyone to have a little background of it.