For my Junior Documentary Project, I was asked to portray and interview a person about a story or aspect of their life. I then gathered primary and secondary research sources to develop a distinct perspective about their subjects significance in the community and/or world. The research-based paper from English serves as the copy for the magazine article and a film, commercial and website. For this unit, narrative-style journalism was the biggest emphasis.
One of my biggest inspirations to how I tackle school and work is my dad. He had to go through highschool and college with almost nothing, and that gave him the bravery and inspiration to beat the system and bend it to his will so he wouldn’t have to put up with it ruining or forcing his life. For this project, I wanted to focus on the story of how he was able to get through college in only 3 years, despite it being 6 years he would’ve gone.
This project was extremely fun to work on, as I learned more details from my dad about how he got to where he was and also put to use all the skills and editing techniques I’ve learned over this school year.
I created a Profile Article in order to introduce and tell the story of my dad in a journalistic way for an audience. The paper covers how he was even able to get through in only 3 years.
After creating the Profile Article, we were tasked with making the full documentary possible. So we warmed up with creating a short introductory video on the documentary project.
This introductory video gave us tips on how to integrate music and audio effects onto our interviewee, as well as giving us ample opportunity to try out all the editing styles and effects we’ve learned over the past year.
Because I am in animation class, we were tasked with creating animations in our documentary, animating parts that would be funny and do well as a story of its own.
We worked on using Photoshop and After effects to comprise animations that were colored and also had their fair share of sound effects to add over the interviewee talking.
Overall, we learned a lot in this unit on how to fully record, produce and edit a professional looking documentary. We took time to get the lighting right using the photo techniques we learned earlier in the year, as well as pro tools and reason to produce music and audio effects for our background and voice to sound better. We used all of our adobe skills in InDesign, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, After Effects and Premiere Pro to put all together to form this documentary and I couldn’t be happier at how we were finally able to put our website skills to use to show it off. It’s been a great year of Digital Media.