In my ten years in school, I have never heard my teacher say that we are going to watch a film every day in class … for weeks. To prepare for our final maker project, we watched a “doc a day”. All of these documentaries were to help us learn story telling and filming techniques so we could implement them in our own documentaries. The driving question for this project was “how can I engage and entertain an audience using my video and story telling skills?”

Our assignment was to create a 3-5 minute documentary on a topic that is meaningful to us and fulfills all the criteria that our class set out. The first challenge I face was coming up with a topic that was both meaningful to me and would have a message. Out of all of my ideas, my best two were:` social media affecting kids my age and the value of strategy games. In the end, I chose to make my documentary about strategy games because I could personalize it more.

The next thing we had to accomplish was to create a treatment and a logline. I found it difficult to say my idea in one sentence for the log line and I found that throughout the project as my vision of my documentary became more clear, I had to change and alter my logline to fit it. 

After this step, we wrote a screenplay and story board. I found the screenplay particularly challenging because it was the first time I had to fill in the details of what my documentary was going to look, and sound like. The storyboard was easy because I took what I wrote in the screen play and created a visual representation of what each shot was going to look like. 

The next step was getting the interviews and filming. Because my documentary was about strategy with a special look at the benefits of chess, I wanted to interview a person who had been playing chess for most of their life. I Could come to the Chess Club one day and interview the seniors who play there. Even though she responded, the times did not work out at all so I interviewed Ms. Brady who runs the chess club here at Seycove. I was very concerned with how I was going to film everything. I needed shots of people playing specific strategy board and card games. I ended up inviting over my friend and her sisters for a game night after school. My younger sister played games with them while I took shots from different angles. To get the credits video section I played a chess match against Gwen while taking a time-lapse video. In case you were wondering … I won!

The peer critique process was not effective except for the voluntary one I did with Teva. We exchanged iPads on our own time and watched each other’s documentaries and gave kind, helpful and specific feedback. 

I am proud of some of my editing choices. For example, I worked hard on the interview. My first draft showed the questions written on the screen paired with Ms. Brady’s answers. The interview was 2 minutes long. I decided to take away the questions on the screen and make it seem more like I was having a conversation with Ms. Brady. With every question, the screen would change to show part of a chess game being played. The overall effect was a more interesting and effective interview. 

While this project was not focused on one of the core competencies, I believe I grew in my communicating core competency when throughout this project I learned how to communicate new knowledge through the form of a documentary. I also showed growth when I had to email a person I did not know for an interview which is not something I would normally do. I really enjoyed talking to Ms. Brady because I could see more of what she enjoys to do. 

Below you will see my final film called Your Turn.