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

For our Documentary Project, we were asked to look outside ourselves, and gather a new perspective in the world. We had to collect the stories of someone out there, and reach far enough beyond our inner circle. This project included lots of research, planning, interviewing, and putting together a final story. In English, we created a article style documentary, and in Film, we created a film documentary.

English

At first, I struggled a lot with the Documentary Project. I chose to do my English project on profound autism and a group called the NCSA, and was lucky enough to be able to interview the president, Jill Escher. This was a topic close to me, as my brother has profound autism, but I quickly learned that covering a topic so engrained with my life (that has affected me super personally!) was both challenging, and took away a lot of the “discovery” part of the topic. Instead of uncovering a story, I was recounting a story that I had experienced incredibly personally in my life, and it was challenging for me–but not the kind of challenge the project intended.

Film

In Film, we started off by creating a mockumentary. This was done to help us practice interviewing techniques (using a microphone, properly utilizing our negative space, and editing together B-Roll!) Ours was about a family that moved into the Freestyle Academy campus and refused to leave, and it was very fun to create:

It was very enjoyable to create something more lighthearted. I definitely needed a “create something to practice a skill” project after the strain of our Narrative project.

After this, we jumped right into our real Documentary, a piece on the Homeless Garden Project. I was very touched by this project and getting to hear these stories. I felt a lot more motivated to work on this, because it was something outside myself–I have never personally experienced homelessness, and I know nothing about gardening, so this was entirely new territory for me. I learned a lot from this project, and was very happy with the way my group and I depicted this story: