Your First Film

I’m back, hello and welcome! We began a project called Vibrant Video about two months ago. Through this project, we gained knowledge about a few various filmmaking approaches. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about because this project was the precursor to another one called Your First Film. In order to design and create a complete documentary film on a subject of our choosing, this made use of the abilities we had gained. This was the year’s major final project for us.

The driving question for today is: Driving Question: How can I engage and entertain an audience using my video and storytelling skills

Here’s me answer: Answer: I can engage and entertain an audience by using different story telling techniques. For example: montage, beginning, middle, foreshadowing, etc. I can also engage an audience using different video skills. For example, close up, transitions, slow motions, time laps (fast-mo). You can see me demonstrating my understating of the driving question through my video.

We started to practice our movie skills with such a small group at first, we rehearsed our interviewing techniques. We learnt the ideal angles to input into our video, how to do an interview effectively, and how to choose an interview subject. Since an interview would make up the majority of our final video, we didn’t delve into the specifics here; instead, we just wanted to practise. We spent an entire class coming up with a topic and some possible questions, filming someone responding to them, and then editing the video together. We could build our final interviews off of this excellent beginning point.

We had to develop an idea for our documentary after honing our interviewing techniques. We completed a few worksheets to try to come up with some suggestions for potential subjects based on our resources and areas of interest, and then we had the weekend to select our interviewee. During this my teacher came up with an example of How sports could positively effect kids in North Shore. Once I heard her idea I knew that I needed to put her idea into action.

For a little while after that, we just focused on clearly outlining and summarizing our ideas and documents. To do this, we created a logline and treatment. A logline is a one or two sentence summary of your movie. A treatment is a succinct description of the what, when, who, and where of your movie. We created a script based on these newly formed concepts. The majority of the mass was located here (writing wise).

Then, we quickly drew out a storyboard. We thankfully didn’t have to make the storyboard super detailed because my drawing was terrible. This made it easier for us to picture the documentary instead of just reading about it in a screenplay and gave us time to consider the angles, camera movement, sounds, and music before it was too late.

We were essentially set free after this. Every other day we had a block to check in and wrap up any incomplete storyboard or screenplay sections, but other than that we were out shooting, interviewing, and editing. In the beginning, we were also instructed to plan ahead for our interview so that we could reserve hours and materials. (I interviewed my father and my Lacrosse coach if you were wondering.)

This went on for about a week and a half and than mostly editing was left, we where in the class editing and working on music for a couple classes. After completing all of the editing, writing, music, and interviews I finished minutes before my documentary was late. Overall I did really enjoy the process of writing, shooting, and editing my documentary. I also want to say thanks to Mrs. Maxwell for giving me her idea to work on, if it wasn’t for her my documentary would’ve been completely different and possibly a lot worse. (P.S. if you want to see my documentary its posted in the link below.)

The Exhibit

The information we received about our impending spring exhibition, where we would be displaying our documentaries, at the end of our documentary project motivated us to finish the film as best we could.

The first step was to choose the groups we would be working in throughout the process. One thing to keep in mind is that we collaborated on creating the majority of our props and setup with the grade below us in order to finish our station. Sepaus, Ben Y, Dana, Fraser, Arianne, Ava, Gabby and I were the first group of students from our grade with whom we began working. For many hours to come, this was our group. After forming our groups, we worked in the extension classroom as our designated station. From that point on, it was really a matter of coming up with ideas for what we wanted to do with our station—which was pretty tight considering we were sharing the room with the grade 10’s—and figuring out how to make it happen.

We discussed more specifics in the following classes and had our plans accepted and rejected until we were very certain of what we wanted to work on. I was put into beyond the classroom, and it was our responsibility to show the audience our understanding beyond the classroom. The exhibition’s topic was the journey of a PLP student, thus we illustrated this by showing the future audience our trips and learning experiences beyond the classroom. Now we did this by incorporating one of our trips (Loon lake) into our station.

After a couple of classes of working by ourselves it was time to add grade 8’s to the mix! For a short portion of this project, we worked alongside the eighth graders, which was great fun and led to some creative ideas. We had little time to work with them because they weren’t in our class. But we managed to pull it off thanks to our quick and effective effort.

We gained a lot of knowledge about what we can actually do as a larger group and how to allocate jobs and responsibilities to both the grade 8 students and ourselves. I also saw how, as the deadline drew closer, our speed really increased. This illustrates how having a strategy and a deadline might enable you to complete the required tasks on time.

I wasn’t there to experience the exhibition because I had a lacrosse game (We won!) I was told it was pretty fun and it went well so I’m happy about that. Overall I enjoyed working with the grade 8’s, they are really responsible. I did enjoy my time working on the exhibition as well, it was a pretty great learning experience!

Until next time,