Hello and welcome back to my blog. This blog is about my Maker project, First Film. Throughout Maker, we’ve been learning filming skills and now got a chance to show what we’ve learned. The main goal of this project was to pick a topic that you’re passionate about and make a short documentary about that topic. There were a few requirements to this documentary.
1- Had to include an interview with someone who can provide insight on the topic
2- Must utilize different filming techniques (pan, zoom, slow-mo, etc)
3- Includes original soundtrack to fit the theme
4- Follows story spine and has beginning, middle, and end (3-5 minutes)
5- Message is clear and something that I care about
6- Voice and sound is clear and consistent throughout
Now if you know me in person, you’d know that I literally never shut up about Taylor Swift. I absolutely love her music and I know all her 9 albums and 2 re-recorded albums by heart.
For my topic, I thought long and hard about what I’m specifically passionate and thought “What if I could actually make this school documentary about Taylor Swift?” At first I was sceptical that my topic would get approved. I realized that if I added more substance, I was more likely to get approved. I then decided to make the focus of the documentary about misogyny in the music industry and how Taylor managed her success despite her struggles of being a woman in the industry.
Being told to just make a documentary seems like an incredibly daunting task. To help it seem more manageable, our Maker teachers Mr. Harris and Ms. Maxwell guided us through several steps to get to the final product.
After deciding out topics, we made a logline, which is basically a sentence describing what our documentary is all about. Mine reads, “Taylor Swift is incredibly successful, even in an industry made for men.”
A screenplay is the entire script along with scene descriptions and acting instructions. Here is the screenplay I made. You may notice that some of it was cut out from the final documentary and there were some things added as well.
After the screenplay, we learned about story boarding, which we previously had done a few times in PLP prior. Using our new knowledge, we created a very simple story board for our documentary using only a few pages. Here is mine:
Once we had all our preparations documents finished, we went on to starting our film process and trying to find an interviewee. I quickly realized I wasn’t going to be able to find Taylor Swift to interview so I had a brainstorm of who I could interview. I sent a few emails out to local female artists with no reply back so I entered panic mode. Mr. Harris then suggested I could interview Ms. Langevin, the choir director at our school who has a history in the music industry. I ended up interviewing her and she was very helpful and insightful.
Even though it was only supposed to be 3-5 minutes, my documentary ended up at 9 minutes and 18 seconds. I had so much to put in and I kind of made it difficult for myself by kind of choosing 2 topics to put into one documentary (Taylor Swift’s life story and misogyny in the music industry.) I think if I were to do another project similar to this, I would definitely try to simplify the screenplay and topic to stay within the time constraints.
The driving question
How can I engage and entertain an audience using my video and storytelling skills?
Throughout Maker, we’ve been learning about what makes a good documentary and how to make an engaging story. I utilized these skills by adding commentary along with songs and quotes from Taylor Swift. In the end I think I created a pretty interesting documentary if you have an open mind and don’t have fragile masculinity.
Why did we do this????
The end goal of this project was to show off our documentaries at the PLP Spring exhibition. This was officially my second Spring exhibition and third exhibition in total. This was the closest I’ve gotten to experiencing a “real” PLP exhibition. The others had been a bit different because of Covid.
We had been preparing for the exhibition for a while in both Humanities and Maker. The theme of my group’s room was “How Do We Learn?” This meant we display our project path and how we do project based learning. My group had lots of brainstorming, lots of stupid ideas, and lots of critique and rejection.
However, in the end, I think we created something pretty cool. This is how the final room looked:
Our documentaries were displayed in boxes to contain the audio. We also had grade 8’s displaying the work they were proudest of. I think one of the highlights of my night was when Teva’s older sister came up to me and said she really enjoyed watching my documentary and learned a ton. This was super rewarding because the main goal of my documentary is for people who know nothing about Taylor Swift to learn a bit about her and maybe give her a chance.
This exhibition gave me a chance to think on my feet, work with others, work on my delegating skills, and more.
Conclusion
In the end, I’m glad I did this project. I learned some very valuable film skills that will stick with me through my PLP journey. I hope you watch my documentary (link at the top) and enjoy it. Thanks for reading and get ready for a banger of a TPOL post.
Sincerely,
Me
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