🌲How Can I Engage and Entertain an Audience Using my Video and Storytelling Skills?🌲
🌲Hello and welcome back to the forest of learning! In this post, I will be reflecting and guiding you through the process of our most recent Maker project “Your First Film”. As the name suggests, we will be making our first ever 3-5 minute entertaining and informative documentary style film on a topic of our choice. In this project, we developed our documentary skills through learning to conduct a proper interview, edit, film, develop sound, and give feedback. This project was challenging for me in many ways, but I feel that from those challenges I was able to learn a lot about filmmaking which is a skill I definitely still have a lot to improve on. This project helped me become much more comfortable with skills I am still developing, and for that, I think it is one of the most valuable for me. If you would like to learn more about this project, keep reading!🌲
As always, we followed the project path throughout the course of this project;
So, as I mentioned, the goal of this project was to complete a film fully made by you, but, what exactly does that mean? Well, in terms of originality, we would each have the responsibility to film every shot using various angles, make our own music, edit each clip, and conduct our own interviews. Outside of the logistics, our film was a documentary style. This meant we spent time learning about documentary techniques through studying and learning about other examples as well. In preparation of this project, we had a very similar project recently called Vibrant Video. In that mini-project, we learned about film techniques from various styles as well as the history of film and more! I encourage you to read more about what we learned to get to the point of accomplishing certain skills HERE. In addition to Vibrant Video, we also completed films in the past such as my About Me Video for my project “Working with Words” or my Private Victory Choiceboard Activity in “Believe in Good” or even my PLP application video from grade 7 and, if I would have done this project earlier, I know they would have been much better.
So, to start this project off, we expanded on a valuable skill we touched on in Vibrant Video; conducting interviews. Their are a few steps in conducting an interview that we needed to learn about such as; developing good questions, filming and positioning, finding a message, and understanding audience. Our first task was to (as you may have guessed) conduct an interview! We worked in teams of three (I was in a group along with Mickey and Alfie, two lovely humans) and worked together to think of a topic of interest and make questions to go along with that topic.
Now, I thought would this was going to be easy but, I was very wrong. After practicing interviews on each other we needed to decide a topic to conduct our real interview on. As a group, our original idea was to learn about job occupations and why individuals chose their line of work- seems simple? No. We faced the problem of miscommunication leading to each person having a different angle and interviews style, different locations and audio quality, and more. So, as most groups were editing their interviews, we needed to scrap our first idea and change it to focus on a topic we could ask peers about; Pets. Overall, I am really happy that we changed our topic- we ended up producing a video which was significantly better than the first. From this experience, I learned that it is definitely worth it to make a detailed plan before going off and doing something on your own within a group project! It was a bit stressful, but overall really fun.
At this point in the project, this is when some fun stuff happened! And, I am not being sarcastic here- it actually is pretty cool. On May 12th, at the beginning of this project, I flew for 16 days to visit family in Israel. It was a really cool experience that not many people get to do and I feel extremely lucky to have been able to go. That being said though, it took place right smack dap in the middle of this project which was slightly inconvenient for future me.
If you would like to read a little about my trip, feel free to, if not, just skip this blue paragraph;
My trip was really fun! I spent nine days in Israel and four days in Denmark (+ three days travelling) visiting family and friends. This trip was so amazing for me. I had been to Israel in the past, but I had not visited since I was nine, which was a very long time for me. Before than, I would visit almost every year, and I remember it fondly. The culture there is just so vibrant. It’s full of life and passion, everyone has so much energy and just seems to be so intense about their joy in life. I loved the feeling of understanding and speaking the language I knew and spoke at home too! It was just such a lovely experience. I spent most of my time there visiting with family, which was also just really great since I don’t have any extended family in Canada. In addition to Israel, I also visited Denmark, which, for me, was one of the best experiences of my life. I was able to reunite with my best friend who moved away over covid. She grew up in Denmark and came to Canada in fifth grade. She left in 2020, which was extremely hard for me. It felt amazing to reconnect with her again, and it made me so happy to be around her. Overall, I just had a great time. I am really lucky to have been able to have such an amazing experience like this.
This trip would also be very valuable to me in this project as well. Before I left for Israel, I knew that I wanted to make my film connect to this trip, so I made sure that I got plenty of footage of the trip. This was not just for the film of course- it was mainly for memories and keepsakes that my family and I can keep and remember. So, this comes to the next portion of this project- choosing the topic!
Now, since I was away for two weeks, coming back on the first day was expectedly pretty overwhelming. I used this Basecamp document to see what exactly I needed to complete- which, was quite a lot. Here was the plan for the “Developing your Film” stage of this project;
I chose my topic on this first day back- which was a bit rushed, but luckily past Teva is a pretty good thinker, because my original idea was the one that I stuck with for the rest of the project. I decided to make my film about my trip, but more about how the trip impacted the way I view my identity and place. I wanted to fixate on the feeling of not knowing your place; which is a struggle that most immigrants face. When I chose this topic, I wanted to use the word “place” because it can be applied to not only your literal geographical location, but also your place within society, your school, your work, your family, and more. This way, my documentary would focus on how immigrants or semi immigrants (like me) find their place. So, I decided to start my documentary with two questions in mind: “How does place shape perspective?” And “What does home mean to you?”.
After choosing my topic, that same day, I crammed and finished my screenplay. Keep in mind, my peers had almost a week to compete this screenplay- and, I didn’t have that kind of time, so I was pretty stressed. I was genuinely really surprised that I completed it so quickly. I am really proud of myself for doing it! I honestly did really well at staying focussed and on task to produce the screenplay that I would be using to base my whole documentary off of, so, way to go me! But, most of all, even though I was stressed, I was so proud of the fact that I still preserved my mental health and worked on renewing myself on that day too. After finishing my screenplay, I went straight into taking care of myself, which is something I hope to implement in the future.
Screenplaying for me was a bit overwhelming to think about on the first day back. In the screenplay, we needed every detail from what shots and clips you would show, to what transitions you would use, the dialog you would say, if it was voiceover or not, who was talking, and much more. It was supposed to be very detailed which is terrifying since I had not even thought of my topic until that day. Overall though, with the help of my friends Fraser, Ava, and Alicia’s screenplays as reference, I produced a screenplay that I stuck with for the rest of the project.
Here is my screenplay ⬇️
One of my biggest challenges while making my screenplay was figuring out interviews. I needed to decide my questions and people to interview fairly quickly. I also needed to film said interviews as soon as possible too. Ideally, this interview would be with an adult or expert of some sort. I was also introduced with the different levels of interviews you could conduct:
- Peer / Seycove Student
- Coach / Teacher / Family Member
- Community Member / Expert in the field
We were pushed for a level three. My issue was, my idea was to make my film primarily around my trip, so I didn’t know how I would tie in other individuals into the film. I ended up deciding to interview individuals who came from a different country. Choosing immigrants allowed me to understand my perspective better too. I decided to interview my sister Noam who was born in Israel, Noam’s partner, Eissen who was born in the Philippines, Sharon who is a family friend that grew up in England, as well as Madame Herrera, my lovely French teacher who moved here from Cuba in 2013.
Noam
Now, onto storyboarding! This is the point that we needed to plan out how our shots would look like through visualizing it. Since I took most of my footage in Israel, this took a short time to compete. It was mainly just messily drawing clips I chose from my camera roll that I would include in my film. The goal of this was for us to have a reference when we stated filming, which was useful to most, but not very to me since I already had most of my footage.
Here is my (not very detailed) storyboard ⬇️
Now, time for filming and editing! As I said, I already filmed most of it in Israel, so, this is actually the part I started getting ahead of some of my peers. It’s not a competition or anything but like, common, it’s pretty awesome that I caught up two weeks of work in three days. I came back just as most of the class was filming, so, that’s what I did too. I shot some B-roll of BC (making sure to exercise film my snazzy filming techniques) and then got right into editing my rough cut! This rough cut was very rough. Wow- shocker, I rough cut being rough. Anyways, yeah, it mostly consisted of my interviews and some B-roll. Which, honestly was still pretty cool, but it definitely was not the best.
This was my rough cut ⬇️
After creating my rough cut, we also had the opportunity to get feedback. Luca provided me with this feedback:
From this feedback, I was able to improve my film a lot!
Now it’s draft time. I won’t go too much into depth of each draft I made, each one is different and have things I like and dislike about them. Each draft was adjusted with feedback from peers, friends, and teachers as well as music made by me using Garage band to produce my final film.
If you would like to check out each draft, click the links below ⬇️
Finally, after a lot of hard work, my film was completed! Special thanks to Ms. Maxwell for helping me improve from draft 2 to draft 3. I was getting a bit strayed from my original focus (which was including me and my experiences more), and she helped me get back on track. I love my film. Even though it’s not perfect, this topic is one of genuine interest to me. I feel that it really leaves you with a strong message and conveys the tone and impact that I wanted to leave the audience with. I think it turned out really nice, and I am proud of how much I did in such little time! Way to go, Teva !
Here is my Final Cut! ⬇️
After creating our films, we spent more time on something a little bit separate from this project; the Spring Exhibition!
The reason why I bring this up, is because we were going to showcase our final products (our films) to our audience, and base our stations on showcasing them. In PLP, I have participated in two exhibitions besides this one: last year, in PLP 8, we helped with the spring exhibition and this year we also had a winter exhibition. I think this year’s spring exhibition was really great! I worked along with 15 other students. 8 in grade nine, and 8 in grade eight. I enjoyed showing my work and celebrating it with my peers. I had a great group, and had fun running my station. From this experience, I learned how to showcase my work in a really fun and creative way!
🌲Overall, this was a project I learned a lot from! I learned to produce a film that showcased a topic I was interested in. My topic really made me think about my identity and worldview, which was really cool to me. Although for me with project was short, it was extremely impactful. It was also very useful! I was able to make and produce my own music, film, conduct interviews, edit, plan, and create my very own documentary! So, How can I engage and entertain an audience using my video and storytelling skills? Well, I can create an original documentary telling a story with a message centred around a topic that is of interest to me that is supported by filmmaking techniques. I learned so much in this project, and, as always, I hope you enjoyed watching me grow in the forest of🌲
🌲learning🌲
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