I made a documentary!

How can I engage and entertain an audience using my video and storytelling skills? I can engage and entertain an audience by using the multiple video and storytelling techniques we learned throughout the last few weeks. Some of those skills include creating a montage, using the rule of thirds, close up, making sure it has a beginning middle and end, etc. I show my understanding of this in my final documentary video.

Hello and welcome back to one of my last blog for grade 9! This project was an interesting project that was based around building new filming skills. To show all of our learning we created our final product which was a documentary. This documentary could be about anything that you are interested in, so I chose my topic which was the horse to human relationship. There were multiple steps to create this documentary which were pretty interesting to learn about. 

We started off this documentary by learning basic interview skills with small groups. We had a chance to interview family members along with class mates to figure out good interview angles. This is when we first started learning about the rule of thirds. But in order to create an interview you need questions to ask your interviewee. Our small group decided to base our few short questions around travel. After filming all the interviews we used our editing skills that we learned about in previous projects to make a proper interview video. I found that these first few activities helped me gain the skills that I needed. In the end this helped me go into the public to plan and film interviews to bring my final documentary together. ⬇️

The next step was coming up with a documentary idea and getting it approved. I personally liked this part because there was lots of space for us to come up with anything we wanted that we are passionate. So I decided to make mine on something to do with horses. A big part of coming up with a good idea was that it had to have a meaningful message. So I jumped back and fourth on many different horse topics then finally landed on my topic – The horse to human relationship. This meant I was ready to move onto the next step which I think besides filming was the most important part, the screenplay. Going into this project I had a pretty vague understanding of what a screenplay was, but after a little bit of time I finally completed mine. There were multiple things that needed to be put into the screenplay which I made sure to add to make things easier when the time came to film. The screenplay included actions, dialogs/voice over scripts, transitions, and a lot of specific information like camera angles, wether it was going to be filmed interior or exterior, and more. I am super happy with my screenplay and it definitely made the filming part of the documentary much easier as well as help keep everything organized. ⬇️

Screenplay

Then came the storyboard which was just a basic sketch of the scene, the action that was being made, camera angle, and lastly what audio would be included during that scene. I probably could have made my storyboard shorter but I decided to make my scenes more specific to help me understand what I would have to film. ⬇️

At last came the most important step, filming. I definitely had lots of fun getting to go to the barn and film everything. But we can not forget the interviews! The interviews were a little more challenging to film as I had to do more planning and communicating to get them completed. In my documentary I included two interviews, both with people from the barn. The first interviewee I planned made plans with over the phone. Before doing this I made sure to have a script making sure I could be as professional as possible. This ended up going great and was filmed with no problems. The second interviewee was easier to plan as I just talked to her in person, making sure to still be professional. I am super happy with how my interviews turned out and I think they definitely brought my documentary together. The rest of the filming took more time as I wanted to get a few specific angles with good lighting. 

In the end we showed our documentaries to represent our learning in the 2022 Spring Exhibition. For the actual exhibition itself we were all put into large groups where we got topics for the exhibition. My rooms topic was the PBL pathway, so our room answered the question “How Do We Learn?”. We answered that by saying we use the project path, learning experiences, and fails to develop understandings and learn. We learn through the activities we complete in class. Each booth will either be an interactive experience for the learning activities or knowledge we build, or will be a showcase of what and how we learn. Overall, our goal is for the audience to understand what we do in the PLP classroom to get to our final product through the use of the project path. 

As I mentioned the grade 9’s in our group showcased our documentaries in the exhibition. We did this by creating specific things as we did for every other booth. For this booth we built sound boxes which would have a playlist of all our videos inside. The audience was able to listen to the documentaries as they walked by. Check out pictures of our room stations ⬇️

Overall I learned so much from this project and I now know how to create a documentary and film interviews! If I were to do this project again I do not think I would change a thing as I am happy with the outcome.