A home is typically where you live. You can live in an apartment in a city, a cabin in the woods, a trailer in a trailer park, a car, or a house in the suburbs. Nearly anything could be a home. For this project, though, I focus on which home might be better: an apartment or a house. Each have their advantages and disadvantages, but the most important question to answer is: For what reason do you want to move into another home?

After the excitement of exhibition, Freestyle knocked its students back into the pace of deadlines with the Documentary project. Students would choose a subject (a person, place, or idea) and create a documentary based on it. In English, students could choose to create a book or a magazine article, learning the specifics to documentary writing and interview questioning. Design would help students create a compelling, easy to read layout for our book/article in InDesign (an Adobe program for layouts). And, depending on a student’s extracurricular class, they would create a documentary film or short introductory video on the subject.

For my Documentary, I chose to create a magazine article about the idea of ‘home’ in an apartment and a house. Also, as I take Digital Media, my assignment was to create a one minute introductory video in AfterEffects (another Adobe program for video editing and animating), which you can see below.

The introductory video is, as you might have guessed, an introduction into the topic of our project. Digital Media students would edit the introduction of their article into a script for the video, including the interesting lead, possible data on our project, and reasons why the topic mattered. In my case, I wrote about a story I made during the winter, when I was very curious about 'home.' I went on to add that the article was geared toward anyone who was looking for a new home, whether they were high school or college students, or even an office worker.

Overall, this project was fascinating and troublesome from the start. Homeownership is a bit of a complex project to take on for a 8-12 page magazine article, which made narrowing the topic down to ‘home’ in an apartment and house an easier task to handle. I also realized that I had no prior experience to creating layouts, or what the article might look like in its final form, so I focused most of my might there (color theory is surprisingly complex). The commercial itself was relatively easy to create after some pre-planning in a notebook. The video itself is perhaps a little dry due to my sticking to the plan strictly. Narrating the video was perhaps the hardest part though, since I speak quietly on even the windiest day.

Below are screenshots of my process for recording the narration for the video in ProTools and creating the visuals in AfterEffects.