We've done it!

Greetings everybody.

At Operation SPLAT we’ve worked for the past two years to make this event happen. We are glad to announce that on March 16^th, we will be co-hosting our fundraiser event at SC Village Paintball Park with Extreme Pros Paintball. All you have to pay is $37 for all day entry, all day air, private games, private ref’s, hot BBQ lunch, drinks, snacks, and rental equipment. You will have to pay for paint separately, but you can buy paintballs from Extreme Pros Paintball before the event.  

Today, we are planning on printing and placing fliers at B.Candy and at a hospital office in Garden Grove. We will make an announcement on Monday, the 10^th, during town meeting at Sage Hill School about the event.  We are currently working on video clips to show to the school at the end of the Service Learning project to inform the school of the journey Operation SPLAT has been on.

We are also glad to announce that another Service Learning group that will act as our successors might join us at the event.  Everybody at Operation SPLAT is very happy that four juniors want to follow in our footsteps in helping the Wounded Warrior Project and honoring our veterans.  

Thank you for sticking with us through this difficult process, and we hope to see you all on March 16^th!

Wednesday Madness

Hello there, fair adversary. It doth seem you hath been eyeing our classy blog. We hath madeth progresseth. Weeth areth very anticipant to forsee events forthcoming. We doth change thee location and timeth. 

Enough with the old english. It's been a long day and I may be going slightly crazy.

We worked today, and it's been a rocky road getting here...

I scream for ice cream! Seriously though, it's been rough. We have some conflicting ideas and personalities in the group, and it's been a challenge learning how to work together. 

After a long talk we've had this afternoon, we've decided to changing our location for the paintball event, and pushing the event back one week. It's a tough decision, and we're still ironing out the details. Moving the event back a week would make things much easier on us, and it creates less schedule conflict. The only concern about moving the event is how much control we'll have if we change our partner paintball park. We've given a lot of thought to the decision, and we're in favor of moving the event. We've found out that Bandapalooza falls on Saturday, the 8th, which will draw away Sage students. It would be better to move to Sunday, the 16th, to have a better group following.  

We've also started editing short clips from all of our interviews together, into a documentary commercialish video to gain attention for the event, and show people what we've been working on the past two years. We're going to have voiceovers with ourselves talking about what the project means to us, mixed with quotes and stories from the interviews.

Alaina has also finished a fabulous poster we can hang up in various locations to gain even more support. 

We've also decided to work with Extreme Pros Paintball to accomplish our event. The amount we will be working together is yet to be decided, but our contact is a friend who we trust, and we are excited to work with him. We'll be meeting either today or Friday to wrap up the details. We need to figure out the finances behind this event. We already have a fair amount of money we've raised by selling gummy soldiers. We need to figure out how much we'd be able to make from this event, how we're going to make that money, and how we're going to share that money with our partners, and give a sizable donation. We're currently thinking that ten percent of ticket price for the event could be donated, but it's not set in stone until we have our meeting. 

Thanks for sticking with us through this difficult journey, we couldn't have done it without support from our friends and our panel. Save the date, March 16th, because this is happening.

Battle on Two Fronts

Today was another wonderful success!
This afternoon we were given the wonderful opportunity to meet face-to-face with some representatives of the Camp Pendleton Paintball Park to go over details about our event that will take place March 8th.  We are hoping to be able to have food trucks with delicious and wonderful meals available that day.

Following the morning meeting with our panel, our event team (Emily and Briton) left for San Diego to clear up some event details, and the promotions team (Alaina and Stephanie) stayed behind at school to perfect the mockups of flyers for the paintball event.

While on the road, Emily continued the editing of our latest interview with Lloyd Gautreaux, grandfather of our very own Alaina, while in the car, and should be finished and able upload it soon. On the home front, Stephanie and Alaina finished 3 mockups for promotional flyers, and await the return of Emily and Briton to help determine the fate of the art.

As always, the day didn't come without its challenges as the event team got lost on the road and Alaina encountered many difficulties with her technology.  Hopefully, the event team will return to us before too long, Alaina will be able to overcome her loathing of her computer, and Emily can return soon to upload the latest video.

On our way!

This week has been filled with the most success in Operation SPLAT history! There are four major things that we've accomplished in the last week.

One. We've finished and uploaded out interview with Steve and the link is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN2N9cUXOJA

Two. Over the weekend, I (Emily) went with Briton to sell our delicious gummy soldiers during the Corona del Mar Christmas walk. We sold all our inventory except for one bag, and we now have a solid amount of money to donate to wounded warriors and to back our project with.

Three. We filmed yet another interview today with Alaina's grandfather Lloyd. It was an emotional interview, and I highly recommend that you watch it. Stay posted for that video, it should be up soon.

 Four. We got a call back from our prospective paintball park and they've agreed to call us tomorrow so we can figure out the details of our event. We're very excited to be working with them, and hopefully everything will go smoothly tomorrow!

Anyways, all of us are incredibly happy with what we've accomplished today. It seems that everything we originally set out to do is finally falling into place. We're excited to have money to donate to veteran aid organizations, and we love filming these interviews and hearing stories from our amazing veterans. We owe it to our vets to give them aid when they come home because of all that they've given up to protect us and protect our country.

To all the veterans out there, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. After hearing all the stories, we can't thank you enough for what you've done. Operation SPLAT is proud to serve our troops, and proud to serve our country.

Preparing for the Future

Hello everyone, we're back! 

Today, after a brief morning meeting we viewed our interview with Arnie Silverman with our panel, paying attention to things we did well and things we can improve on with our later interviews. If you haven't seen that video, you can follow THIS LINK and go watch it. If I had to pick a role model, it would be Arnie Silverman because he's such an inspiring person and he's been through a lot.  Please take some time to check it out!

After our meeting we set to work by revamping our interview script and calling a possible host for our fundraising day. Last service learning day, we called and then emailed a prospective paintball park host for the event. However, we never got a reply. We re-called the paintball park and they gave us new contact information and promsied to get back within a week. Fingers crossed all goes well! 

We've also scheduled another interview with a more modern military veteran tomorrow. We've set up a location, done a practice interview, and completed a tech run. If everything runs well the video should be edited and uploaded around two weeks from now. 

Last service learning day, there was a lot of stress and worry towards the success of this project. After all the hard work we've done today has lowered the tension by an enormous amount. All of the work feels manageable, and our group has come together through all the problems we've been faced with. We're prepared to make our wounded warriors paintball day come together, and we're excited to share more never-before-heard inspiring veteran tales.

My War: Memoirs of the Korean War

Our group filmed the following interview as a part of our interview series plan to share military veteran's stories. It's an inspirational story and worth the listen. Arnie Silverman, a Korean War Veteran, talks about things never before heard about the Korean War. Enjoy!

http://youtu.be/yKK8cNCIiMQ

New Directions

Today was a very... interesting day. 

We started off the day a bit split. Some members of our group wanted to focus on interviewing veterans, and others wanted to stick with the paintball event. We hashed out our ideas a bit, and ended up finding a solution.

Half of our group from now on will mainly be working on interview segments and the other half will be working on working out all the details for our fundraiser. For our fundraiser we've decided to hold a sort of special day at a paintball park with the proceeds going to support wounded veterans. We also want to show interview segments at the event.

We've email a prospective host for our paintball day and we really hope we can work with them. They seem to be the perfect host, and we think the day will have a real impact. Hopefully we'll hear back from them soon!

We've also set to work to find more people to interview and more stories to share. 

Today we're really broken down what we want to do, so we can divide and conquer and get more work done. We still have a lot to do, but now that we've assigned jobs to each person, we'll make a lot more progress. 

PS: Michael Schlitz part III coming soon