Religion Project Reflection
In humanities, we all had to choose a religion to study for four weeks. For my religion, I chose Voodoo. Voodoo is a religion that believes that the universe was created by one being or god. They also believe that you can talk to that one god though many different spirits. Voodoo worshipers can communicate to the spirits through chants, Voodoo songs, drumming and dances. Before doing this project I didn’t know much at all about the religion and didn’t know exactly what I was going to think about it. Now that I know so much about the Voodoo religion I understand the reason why they believe in spirits and rituals.
I choose Voodoo as my religion because I knew pretty much nothing about it. To be honest, before choosing which religion to, do I had no idea that Voodoo was religion. I started researching about it and it sounded very interesting. The more I learned about the religion I started understanding the Voodoo beliefs and wanted to learn more.
From the first day I started researching Voodoo I found out that I was very interested by Voodoo spells and rituals. I watched a video about how a Voodoo priestess gave dead girl life again and I was amazed. Because I liked the spells and rituals so much I decided to revolve the craft of my project around them.
The plan of my project was to first write an essay about the whole religion. After writing my essay I searched all over the internet for Voodoo spells and rituals to post. I found the ritual and wrote it in my own words so that later on I could just use the exact words I wrote. For me, this was by far the hardest part of the whole project. When I had enough spells and rituals to choose from I chose a one that was possible to do and that I thought was the most interesting. I then got the materials that I needed to reenact the ritual. I filmed me doing and saying the ritual and made it into “how to” movie.
Writing my essay was fairly easy. For my research, I felt that the internet had a lot of information and most of the websites I came upon I trusted. I first did a lot of research and video watching without taking notes so I could get a better understanding of Voodoo. After understood the basics of the religion I took notes on the research I found and stated writing it in my own words. I really liked this method of researching because I leaned about the topic I am studying first, before I start writing my essay and creating the project. In a few of projects I have done in the past I just jumped in to gathering facts about the topic and ended up having to filter through it, trying to understand it while I am writing my essay.
I feel that my essay was written very well. I spent about two weeks on it and it was very factual. The one thing that I think that could be improved is that I could have included a bit more information on how Voodoo in Haiti is different than it is in Africa. But over all I think that I put a lot of effort into it and I am pound of this essay.
Researching the Voodoo spells and rituals to post onto my blog was very difficult. There were a lot of websites that said they provided them but it actually ended up that they were just selling spell and ritual kits. In the end I only found about eight total. These were from websites made by many people that posted their own Voodoo rituals.
My movie that I made was in my opinion very successful. I worked really hard gathering the materials I needed to make it look as realistic as I could make it. I think that the hardest part of making it was making it look like I was actually getting rid of a curse. Also, editing the video was difficult because I had a lot of footage and sound to edit. Over all my movie turned out almost exactly as I wanted it to.
From the feedback that I got from my classmates and Rob I could have made at least one more ritual or spell to make a video out of. I think that although that would have been more factual and would give a better idea of the Voodoo religion it would have been extremely difficult to accomplish. I was pressed for time making a movie out of one spell that could be done both ways; if I reenacted one more the movie I probably would have not put as much effort and would had had enough time to get it as I wanted it.
Over all I think that this project was very successful. I think that I put a high amount of effort into it and very rarely got off topic. I think that Rob and my classmates enjoyed both my project and my presentation. I think that for the next project I should look to this one for future reference.
