Welcome back to my blog. This post is a reflection on our latest maker project, ‘Your First Film’. In this project, we created a documentary. The documentary could be on anything, but there were a couple of requirements. The film must:
- Utilize dynamic filming techniques.
- Includes sound track tat fits the theme and tone that is 100% original.
- Follows a story spine and is structured to engage the viewer(Beginning, Middle, End – 3-5 Minutes).
- Used interview to enhance film, show active listening, and give context to the message.
- Message is clear and something the learner cares about. Voice and sound are clear and consistent throughout the film.
The first thing that we did was take a look at some things that we cared about. As soon as I heard about this project, I knew I was going to somehow relate it to mental health. The other main things that I considered were music, and climbing. After struggling to come up with a good message and topic, I ultimately went with the close connection between mental and physical health, and how climbing is a good way to tackle both of those challenges because it poses both a mental and physical challenge. Here is my original pitch.
I would like to do my documentary on climbing and the correlation between physical health and mental health. My message will be that being well physically can have a huge impact on your mental and spiritual wellbeing. My documentary will hopefully be centred around the people that climb in gyms and outdoors and the benefits of physical exercise. I will also explain the reasons that climbing is a good way to get fit. I will list things that include the feeling of progression and accomplishment that comes from completing climbs, the social nature of climbing, and the fact that regularly climbing trains all parts of your body, whereas other sports may train one part of your body more than others.
Based off of this idea, here is my final documentary.
This project was definitely one of my favourite ones that we have done this year, but also probably the hardest. I know that a lot of people struggled with this project because of the short time that we had to do it. We had about 3 weeks to create a 3-5 minute documentary. While that may seem like quite a bit of time, this also included all of the class time we had, as well as creating our storyboard, screenplay, and all that jazz. While this project had its ups and downs, I am very proud of how my final product turned out. Now for the process of creating my documentary.
As I have gone over, we started with brainstorming and pitching. After that, we created our screenplay. For me, this was one of the hardest parts of the early project. This was because we had to jump from an idea, straight to exactly what we were going to do. After being stumped for a while, I eventually powered through one afternoon and created my screenplay, which can be viewed here.
Climbing Documentary Screenplay
When looking back on my screenplay, I think that it sounds like one giant advertisement, which I don’t like. In the end, my documentary – while staying true to the screenplay – did not turn out like one big advertisement. I also did not think about my interview much while writing my screenplay, which I think really helped me. Because I was not basing my entire documentary around my interview, and using my interview to enhance my documentary, I had a lot more freedom to film and was not relying on my interview. On the flip side of this, I did not prioritize my interview and that resulted in my interview coming in late, which did not help for editing.
After completing my screenplay, which I was quite proud of, we moved on to storyboarding. The thing I did not understand was that the screenplay had all of the information that the storyboard would have, the storyboard was just a visual way to show that. I already had a vision of where my documentary would go, and as a result of that, my storyboard was very rushed and did not end up getting finished. Here are the scribbles that I call my storyboard.
The next step was filming. I am very happy that I had an entire week with barely anything going on, so I went to the climbing gym for almost 2 hours a day for 3 or 4 days in a row, and got all of my bulk filming out of the way. On one day, I got to the climbing gym at 4 PM, filmed and climbed for around 90 minutes, then I went upstairs and started editing while I ate my dinner, started climbing class at 6:30, climbed for another 2 hours, and then filmed my interview. This was great because most of my shots were of the climbing gym, so I could film almost all of my shots. There were also a bunch of shots that I had to do outside of the climbing gym, and those also got filmed pretty quickly. I think that my interview went really well, and I’m quite sad that I had to cut out most of it so that I could keep my documentary under 5 minutes. You can watch the originally full interview here.
In the end, I only used 1 of the 7 questions I asked.
The final part of this project was editing and music. The editing was pretty easy, but tedious and time consuming nonetheless. I had all of my shots and I knew where they needed to go, so that made things a lot easier. The hardest part was cutting down my interview. As I have said before, the original interview was much longer than the one you see in the documentary. While I’m sad I didn’t get more of it in, I think it resulted in a documentary that wasn’t just the interview. I used a microphone from the school for my voiceover, and I think that it really provided clarity for my voice, and overall improved the quality of the documentary.
Finally it was time for the music. For the entire project, I was looking forward to making my own music. I knew that we would be using GarageBand, and I have used GarageBand quite a bit in my life. In the end, we didn’t spend much time on it in class and I left it until the day before the final product was due to start it, so I did not spend as much time as I wanted to on the music. I sill think that the music turned out great, but I think that it could have been better. Here is the original voiceover, and the original music, each without anything else.
So now for the driving question. ‘How can I engage and entertain an audience using my video and storytelling skills?’ I think that people can do this in many ways. There are many different genres of film, each using different styles of storytelling and filming. Each genre engages different audiences in different ways. This is evident in the documentaries we watched each day. There are many things to learn from watching examples, and I that without the Doc a Days, my documentary would have turned out very differently. For me, there is only one way I can truly engage and entertain my audience, as I am not a professional film maker. This is by creating something that I put a lot of time and care into and making it about something that I care about.
This has been one of my favourite projects, but if I were to do it again, I would do it slightly differently. I would probably spend more time getting a different variety of shots so that my documentary would be more entertaining to watch. I also wish that this project took place over a longer time, and I wish that there was a less strict restraint on the time. I think that my documentary if I had time to put in my full interview, as well as getting more shots to put over the interview.
I think that this project was one that built a lot of great skills that I will use in the future, both for PLP and things outside PLP. Thank you for taking the time to read my blog, and have a great day.
Leave a Reply