Hello, and welcome back to another blog post. In this one, we made a documentary. In the final maker project of the year “Your First Film”. The purpose of the documentaries was to have us use our filming techniques and interview etiquette to make an awesome film. The Driving Question for this project was “How can I engage and entertain an audience using my video and storytelling skills?”

 The answer will be at the end. But now here is how I made my Awesome!! Documentary. To start we had to pick a topic for our documentary I made my topic about food wastage. We were building up to this with the previous maker project Vibrant Videos which in case you forgot you can check out here! 👉 (link). Now onto the process itself. To start we made a treatment and a log-line. A log-line is a short 2-3 sentence description of your film and a treatment is a longer version of your log-line it is a paragraph like what you would see on the back of a book. Here are both. 

After this, we were to plan our layout using a Screenplay which would provide direction for each shot. Here it is. 

After writing my screenplay we moved onto a storyboard to help us visualize shots and to get into specifics of how long each shot would be and here I thought I would have enough time to do what I wanted but soon would realize that I did not.

 

 

Next it was time to start filming as I assembled my first couple of shots I realized that I would have to adjust my planning as what I had written in my screenplay and storyboard would not look good on camera. So I adjusted on the fly I cut some lines that sounded bad. The cutting of the scenes and lines was very eye-opening as I realized I could not do everything I wanted within the allotted 3-5 minutes of footage. I began to make a rough cut I started with getting my B-roll cooking shots and got all of that done. As I was editing those clips I inserted interview placeholders to help me organize my shots into the correct order. After I edited down my B-roll I conducted both interviews with my mom and dad this went relatively well my only regret was that I didn’t interview anyone other than my mom and dad but I certainly had the opportunity to as I could have sent an email to the Foods teacher at Seycove. For next time I will take the time to reach out to others in the community past my family. 

After inserting my interviews I realized I needed one last thing one key thing to tie it all together. Music. I made my song in garage band using Live Loops which was fun and a new experience for me as I had never really explored what you can do in GarageBand. Here is what my track looked like in GarageBand 

And here is the music only in case you want to listen to that. 

And now it all ends here with the answer to the Driving Question. As a reminder is: “How can I engage and entertain an audience using my video and storytelling skills?” I believe that I can now use B-roll, well-conducted interviews and storytelling elements to tell an engaging and entertaining story through film. In case you want to watch the documentary again click here—> documentary. 

Thanks for reading!! Carter=bløg