Hello readers, and welcome back to the blog. It’s been a while since I’ve posted, and a lot has happened in PLP 9. Today I’ll be talking about the project we just finished in Maker 9. This project is called “my first film”, and was all about documentaries. In the end, we created our own documentary, on a topic of interest. The driving question was: “How can I engage and entertain an audience using my video and storytelling skills?”. You can do this by using interviews, b-roll, multiple angles, and many other skills. 

To start this project off, we conducted our own interviews. We were split into groups, and we chose a topic and specific set of questions. Our topic was: “does pineapple belong on pizza?”. Over that weekend, we had to interview a family member or friend and record it. I interviewed my friend Tyler. After we each conducted an interview, we brought our clips together, and created one big video. This assignment was really helpful, cause it was our first crack at interviewing, and it tested our video making skills.

During the entirety of the project, we watched a “doc a day”. While we watched these docs, we answered questions about them. It really helped us in getting ideas for our documentaries.

Then, it was time to determine our documentary topics. We filled out this interest brief sheet, to get some ideas:

I chose to do my doc on granite falls, since I live really close to it, and it’s something I’m interested in. I focused on the falls’s history, and how its changed over the years.

Here’s a picture of granite falls:

The first step was to create our treatment and Logline. A treatment and Logline are breif descriptions that specifically explain your topic. 

Here’s what my treatment and Logline looked like:

After we completed the treatment and Logline, we created our screenplays. A screenplay breaks down each shot, and what’s in the shot. So it was an outline of what our final documentary would look like. 

Here’s what the first draft of my screenplay looked like:

My first draft was good, put it needed a few fine tunes. I needed to add more detail on how the falls are currently used, and give examples. So I got to work on my second draft:

We then created our storyboards:

In this storyboard, we started to envision our shots and what the doc would look like. We also had to include the different camera angles that we planned on using.

Now for the documentary….

We started by organizing interviews, and beginning to film our shots. It was a tough process to plan an interview, as I had to find a time that worked for me and my interviewees. But, it wasn’t that tough to organize film time, as granite falls is pretty close to my house. 

After we handed in our rough cuts, we did a peer critique activity. At that point, my doc wasn’t fully completed so most of my critique was pretty straight forward. However, I was told that I only had a middle and end, and I was missing an intro. Also, that I had to connect the topic to myself, and what the falls meant to me… 

Then I began to craft the final cut…..

I took the critique and used it to improve upon my documentary:

To summarize, I learned lots about videography and filmmaking in this project. Those skills are really important to me as a learner, since we’ll be building of these skills next year. I also really enjoyed making my documentary. It was cool to teach others about the areas around me. The toughest part in this project was the editing, it was really tough to sync everything together.

Thanks for reading!