Just watched a documentary about beavers. Best dam show I’ve ever seen.

Where to start. This blog post is about two of the biggest projects that i’ve done all year. Also two of my favourites, Two of the longest, and two of the most stressful. They also both involved me working with many people which I enjoyed. 

If you’ve been reading my blog posts recently you would know that I have a big passion for film. Like I said in my “Film making is the bomb💣” post – It combined some of the things that I like doing the most, editing, filming and directing. So naturally when I heard we would be doing a project that was just us making a documentary about anything we want, I went crazy with excitement. There were however some creative constraints. Things like it has to be 5 mins or less, it has to have a visible message and has to be about something important. So instead of making one about my friend Dominic and his workout journey like I intended, I had to make it about something else. 

I eventually chose to make it about the Wigwam inn and the Buntzen power station on the Indian arm. But since those two places are kinda “creepy and haunted” I chose to make it like an investigative documentary. 

Earlier in maker we learned about how to interview people and how they should be filmed. So with that knowledge we had to include an interview in our final film. I decided to interview one of my classmate’s fathers because he lives near and knows a lot about the abandoned power station and the wigwam inn. But before that, I had to figure out my story spine, i had to make a log line and a screen play. That took me a while since I was always revising it because I wouldn’t find it to be as good as it could be.  But eventually I finished all my preparation for the documentary, I had a shot list planned, and I scheduled my interview. 

In the end one of my biggest regrets about my documentary was that I didn’t pick a interviewee that was more connected to both places. But one cool thing that I got out of choosing him is that I went up to his house to film the interview, and I was able to use his boat to get shots of the wigwam inn and the buntzen power station. So I pretty much got all of my shots done within a week and a half of the project being assigned. 

Another thing that we had to do was edit and make music for out documentary. That wasn’t a big problem for me however because I make music all the time at home and with the band that i’m in. Also for the editing part, I’ve always been pretty good at editing. It’s actually always been a strong suit of mine ever since grade 6, so I was good in that area too. But still it took me a while to get it up to my own standards. 

Then after I finished it we started to prepare for the exhibition. This year didn’t really have a clear theme, but still like every other year we had to show our learning to the parents that came. Another thing that was different for us this year was that we had to include the grade 8’s to our areas of the school, which I don’t think many grade 9’s liked, but I did. In my group there were two grade 8’s that I play basketball with and the rest of them I didn’t really know. 

The area that I was put into was the intro, which at first I thought would be pretty fun. But I was pretty wrong. We went over a bunch of ideas of what we could do in that area, but eventually we decided to have two little “skits”. In the first one we showed a boring classroom where the students didn’t like the way they were learning. In the second one we showed a teacher throwing away a textbook and showing an iPad. We would also say things in them but it would often change.

The reason that I found my part to be kind of boring is because I was just a student being excited about not using textbooks anymore. Me and Cameron B would just act excited for a few seconds then when another group would come we would do the same. I would have much rather had been inside explaining something to the parents about iPads or the project path. There were a few upsides to being in my area though. For example, we would have everyone’s documentary’s playing on loop in-front of us which was pretty intertwining to watch. Also there wasn’t much moving involved.

Tired male student or worker sit at home office desk look in distance having sleep deprivation, lazy millennial man distracted from work feel lazy lack motivation, thinking of dull monotonous job

To conclude this post, this was the last maker project of the year and it has been really fun to do. Learning about movie history and movie making was super fun to do, and I know that most people in the class think the same. The exhibition was also pretty fun, but had a lot more potential to be more fun for me, and everyone else in the intro. But overall, I had a great year with maker and I hope that it’s even better next year.