Documentary

Introduction

The Junior documentary project was one of the largest project by far. We took a step away from creatively expressing ourselves and expressed something from the people around us. Picking and choosing important issues in the community to address, and finding a way to use the medium we have chosen to explore that.

This was split into roughly two parts, the animation and the article.

The Vision

The article had a very different beginning. It was first made with the idea of individualism and collectivism as the main focus, since this idea is a fairly important idea to me. I want to observe 3 different aspects of this idea with 3 different people, two supporting the different ideals and one being the middle ground. However, after trying to make it work for a week or 2, it just didn’t work out. The idea was too abstract and also was extremely different than the profile article I was supposed to do. So after a quick talk with Mr. Grecko (The English teacher at freestyle academy), he helped me fix my article. The old idea couldn’t be salvaged and if it could, I would need a lot more time with it. So the central theme changed to isolation and the benefits.

The Reflection

Looking back on this, I could have done both better and easier. However, making an effort to stand out of my comfort zone is something that I have been trying to achieve. So this unit, I feel is the greatest example of this as in almost every elective, I had to do something that I would have been willing to do without that push and help from teachers, friends, and my mental will power.

The Research Paper

Life is constantly busy. It demands so much from us, we talk constantly, go out with friends, and find noise to keep us moving. In my article, I profile A. V. Duenas, Margarita Duenas, and Zeytin Ercan in hopes to portray the benefit of the quiet and open people’s eyes to how the world chatter and constant communication has its flaws. Said flaws that can be fixed with 10 minutes to yourself.

The Animation

The animation is fairly different from the research paper and magazine, you could argue that they have no connection at all actually. The reason why is because the animation pretty far in development before the switch in the article was made, still using the first interview that was talking about collectivism vs individualism.

I was first hoping to use at least one question from each interviewee, so they all were equally in the project. However, the one question from my first interviewee was the shortest one in it and it already filled 1 minute of the 1 and a half minute minimum. Seeing that, I realized that trying to juggle all of these interviewees would probably lead to an unfinished project so I had to scrap the other interviewees’ portion.

After apologizing profusely to the other interviewees, I started to get to work. I had a fairly good feel for what I wanted the animation to be, so I pretty much just went in there with no other resources than one character drawing and an incomplete storyboard. I had to get a head start if I wanted my animation to both be good enough AND make it on time. I wanted to have a confessional style, with a fairly good focus on the “human expression”. Funnily enough, the character I made had no face (For aesthetics and I didn’t want lip syncing to take up time), so I had to express the emotion with body movement. So that meant, me sitting in my chair pretending to be this posing doll person for 30% of the time. So after I managed to get the rough animation done, I had 2 or 3 days to color everything in and put it all together. The good thing was I had some of the worrying things done (i. e. all the backgrounds, the audio, most of the line work), but that still didn’t mean that I was off the hook and it was a breeze, it was still incredibly time consuming and I barely managed to finish it. When I did however, I managed to turn out fairly nice.

The Article

To send off this unit, we made the research paper into an article!

This was in Digital Media so we learned InDesign before jumping head first into this project, which really wasn’t much. I did have some fun designing it, making things outside of InDesign (i.e. using photoshop and illustrator). I made graphics and made it what it was. Adding and finding the photos were definitely hard and last minute, but I managed to pull through. To be honest, though this project really was the best part of this whole unit, there really wasn’t much to talk about. All that should be said is in the article itself.

Biographies

A. V. Duenas

Zeytin Ercan

Margarita Duenas