Hooooooooooooooolllllllaaaaaaaaaaa
Recently we finished a project about us making our own mini documentaries using skills we learned in our previous maker project and some we learned in this one.
I enjoyed this project because of its simplicity. We didn’t have to read any textbook pages or do our own research because we had already learned most of the skills we needed in our previous Maker project, “Vibrant Video”.
We did however learn some of the basics to creating a documentary like recording and performing an interview, how to create a screenplay, how to ask for an interview and how we can transition and make our documentary look nice by using specific b-roll that relates to your topic. We learned all this by mainly watching a “Doc a day”. Every class, we would start by watching a short documentary that Mr. Harris chose because each one focused on a certain aspect of a documentary that we can use in our own.
I decided to make my documentary about the effect Pop Culture has on people. I decided to base my documentary around Pop Culture because a couple months ago I spent a week in New York, and its pretty much impossible to not see a aspect of Pop Culture anywhere you look.
Before we started filming, we had to create a plan of what or documentaries were going to look like. We created something called a screenplay which pretty much is a film without the film. It’s a step-by-step paper that tells you exactly what the setting is, who says what, what transitions there’ll be, what the setting and theme is like, labels for each scene and cutaway. It took a while for me to create my screenplay because I wanted to show so much (which ended up not happening). After finishing, I realized that if I were to join the film industry, I would probably excel at making screenplays – not so much at the filming part of it.
As soon as I started to film, I immediately found that it was going to be a challenge. I had assumed I had a lot of the footage from New York already but turns out I had needed to film more videos. I eventually managed to resolve that problem by asking my family members if they had any videos of their own. Since I was a little behind, I took a day off to quickly film some shots while the house was quiet and finish my video off so that it could be ready to be presented at our 2022 Spring Exhibition.
⬇️ Pop Culture documentary below ⬇️
I really enjoyed this project because as soon as I knew what mine was going to be about, I was excited to film and create my documentary. This was my favourite Maker project because filming is something I’ve been meaning to learn more about because I’ve been starting to make my own little videos so I definitely found what I learned in both “Vibrant Video” and this project really useful.