Documentary Project (Set)

     The second important project I want to talk about is one that didn't go exactly as planned: creating a documentary. 

    I was assigned to a group with two other classmates of mine, and we got to planning as soon as possible. After brainstorming several possible topics, two things inspired a topic that we really jived with.

• Over the summer, I did an internship with my county library system that included guest speakers and interviews. One of these speakers, Greg Steiner, stuck with me specifically for his brutal honesty about supporting yourself in a creative career and how you'll have to take on streams of income that don't necessarily inspire you.
• Our state offers scholarships to graduating students who meet certain requirements. My group member Isa brought up recent talks that the scholarship program would change in coming years to only be awarded to students pursuing certain traditional majors, leaving the arts up in the air.

    With that, we decided that we wanted to make a documentary on the process of growing up as a creative person and navigating the school system, societal standards, and the choices people make as to whether to pursue their passions as careers or attempt to keep them in their lives alongside traditional affairs. It would be called "Don't Quit Your Day Job."

    We quickly became very passionate about the project and set up the following outline

    We also decided that the shots of the children would begin at a very wide angle, and the resulting negative space would be filled with doodles and animations, to emphasize the interviewees youth and imaginative possibilities. We'd keep this going, but make the angle tighter and animations less visible with each consequent age group. Additionally, the music used throughout the film would be exclusively from the musicians we interviewed and doodles would be from the artists themselves.

We had about 3 weeks to get this done. You might be sensing mistake #1

    Our next job was planning interviews. We came up with questions such as the following

    Even under such a time crunch, we successfully planned, scheduled, and conducted TEN interviews with various subjects of different ages, arts, and life choices within one week . We even researched new software systems to get higher quality remote interviews from subjects who lived out of state or overseas.

Then came the production process

    The recording process went fairly smoothly, save for some inconsistencies in the way we shot subjects. There were things that were difficult to avoid, like quality differences between our remote and in-person interviews, but there were also differences between out in-person interviews, like some subjects being centered and some being put on a third. I think we could have made things more consistent if we made sure we were all clear on certain guidelines before heading out to film.

    Moving on, the post-production process is what caused the most problems. The first thing we did was transcribe our interviews, highlight our favorite responses, and arrange and rearrange them to form a cohesive storyline. 

Our final intro sequence

    Most detrimentally, we suffered a lack of B-roll footage. This is because we were given the restriction at the beginning of the project that we were not allowed to use archive footage, as a way to strengthen out own camera skills. However, most of what we could film ourselves wasn't exactly relevant to, say, a Polish college student or senior Customs and Border Patrol officer (obviously). To make matters worse, we didn't have enough time to add in the animated graphics and doodles that would've added visual interest in lieu of that crucial B-roll (another real shocker..). Another guideline for the project was a 5 minute time limit, but with 9 interviewees, this resulted in us having to cut important context from our interviewees lives like more detailed discussion of medical conditions, economic drawbacks, and post-secondary education.

    Overall, I have a few gripes with the way I handled this project. Early on, I had a relatively large say in the creative direction and planning process, and although my peers said that they enjoyed the process, I don't think I should have taken such a dominant role in the production. I feel that I could have been a better communicator/teammate, being honest with myself. Secondly, I was clearly way too ambitious with my ideas. The archive footage restriction, time limit, and other guidelines were things we knew about from the day the project was assigned, but I got a bit too excited and planned with none of my limitations in mind. 

    I find this to be a really valuable learning experience because I shifted from the mindset I had with my AS final (just dream big and figure out a way to make it work), to being able to comprehensively plan out a piece while accounting for time and limitations. I realized that this didn't necessarily mean toning down my creativity or capping a piece's potential either, as I was able to critique my peers projects, who were able to do amazing things with what we were given. The overambition and lesson learned seem a little silly and obvious now, but hey, sometimes we learn from experience. Having come from an AS final where I worked alone, I also became motivated to learn more about working cohesively with a team and being a good leader.

    I've spoken a lot about the shortcomings of this documentary, but to be clear, I'm still very fond of what we were able to put together, as well as the big idea we had in the first place. If given the opportunity and the time, I would love to come back to this piece and incorporate everything we wanted to grow it into. For now though, I had to just take the learning experience and keep it rolling. In the next project I discuss, I think I was able to improve on the faults I identified here.

This is how it turned out