Documentary

Introduction

“How do you creatively and truthfully portray a significant person, group, place, idea, or issue in the community?”

Going into this project, this was our stated goal for our documentary and our article. In our projects previous to this, we had been focusing on discovering ourselves, and our own artistic vision. This project takes a different approach. In my eyes, the documentary unit is an awakening to what real life is like. No one really cares about what you as a person has to say, or the art that you make. You have to prove that your work matters. Part of the proving process is giving back to your community; showing the work that other people have done, and why it’s important. In order to truthfully portray a significant idea in our community, I believe you have to be personally invested in it. Without one’s own enthusiasm and hope for the future of the idea they’re covering, the documentary will come out in-genuine, bland. Film making is really just a form of showing emotion, and telling a story. Without understanding what makes something cool and interesting, it’s simply impossible to make your audience understand either.  Knowing this, I chose to cover something that I had a lot of prior knowledge covering, and something I knew would be really cool to explore further.

Drones

I knew that Drone Racing was something I wanted to cover. I had watched a lot of videos of people racing, and using VR goggles to maneuver from the perspective of their drone. In addition to this personal interest, I had a feeling that making a documentary about it would make for some interesting footage. I was very right, but filming drones came with it’s own set of challenges. The interesting shots I was imagining getting either came from tracking drones with high level equipment, or having good quality cameras attached to the racing drones. When we were filming this, we had neither, since we only had our tiny DSLR camera and the racing drones had no high quality camera to strip down on weight.

In hindsight, knowing these limitations we did work around them pretty well. A workaround for tracking drones was filming these “gates” they had to fly through. Because they had to fly through a hoop with bright LED’s, it was the perfect bottleneck to get high intensity shots of drones flying. We also used the occasional footage directly from the drone feed, however the quality of it wasn’t very good, think Youtube but in 2010. And add in a bunch of that VCR noise. That being said, it did add sort of a vintage-techy vibe to our b-roll, which gave our project a unique feel.

Overall, I learned a lot from this project, and I confronted my biggest challenge filming. I had a bit of background going into this class, having 3 years of broadcasting and film-making classes beforehand. Even throughout my time in those classes, I struggled to interview one or two people on my own. This project changed all of that. My partner was just as shy as I was, and knowing that these interviews were mandatory, I knew I had to grow up and talk to people. And because of that, I’m thankful I chose drone racing as my project. The drone racing community was super friendly, and gave me the perfect training to step out of my comfort zone, and interview complete strangers, who were also adults. For me, it took a lot of courage to talk to random people like that, and completely invade their privacy, and personal space. This newfound confidence leaked into my broadcasting class, where by comparison asking students to interview was child’s play. After interviewing drone racers, we worked ourselves up to interview professionals at Intel working on groundbreaking technology: the ones behind the magic drone show at last the Korean Olympics! After successfully pulling that off, and getting really comfortable with my shooting equipment, I can confidently say I am almost at the level of creating professional content. Looking at the videos I made before this project almost make me cringe because of how much I’ve grown. So many technical and social skills have improved throughout this, and I’ve even learned to manage my time better!

That being said, this project was still a lot of work, and was still very challenging. By far the hardest part of this documentary was honing down our focus. I had a general idea at what I wanted our project to be, but throughout multiple rough cuts, we kept getting our vision wrong again and again. We ended up interviewing Intel employees through a last minute connection (thanks Natalie), and through absolute necessity. It was last minute, and I’m talking half a week after the technical due date (all in the name of perfection!) I’m thankful for the challenge we had to go through to make this, and also the opportunity to grow as a person. This was project was a complete rollercoaster of emotions, and I’m happy with the result!

Documentary

Transcripts:

Mockumentary

Our mockumentary film was made as a first step to learn the basics of documentary filmmaking. Because the essence of the genre, mockumentaries make fun of documentaries, so mistakes can be acceptable because they’re just assumed to be part of the art form. We were trying to be funny with this, but in all honesty it wasn’t.