Introduction
The focus question for this unit was “How do you creatively and truthfully portray a significant person, group, place, idea, or issue in the community?”. Our task in the Junior Documentary project was to portray a person, group, place, or issue that we found interesting and use primary and secondary sources to form a specific perspective about our subject’s significance in a larger community or world context. This unit had a special emphasis on narrative-style journalism. We completed a research based paper in English that served as the base for a magazine article and animated documentary film.
I decided to do my documentary project on Stella Bennett. When I first heard about the project and was discussing potential ideas about who I should profile, I was reminded that one of our family friends had been diagnosed with aplastic anemia and undergone a bone marrow very recently. When it came to actually choose our subjects, I reached out to Stella and she graciously agreed to be my interviewee. Due to a school trip cutting a week out of my project time, we had our interview early, and I got started on the outlining process for what I wanted to do for both my animation video and my essay.
This project definitely pushed far beyond anything I had done before. Every single part of the project was something I didn’t really have a whole lot of experience in doing, so there was a lot of trial and a lot of error as I made my way through it. I think I learned a lot from this project and the final product is something that I am really proud of, so despite its ups and downs, I am very grateful that I did it.
Documentary Article
Our first task was to create a research paper on our subject. We were given instructions and outlines to help make our paper and writing as professional as possible, which was a little bit daunting at first. Our class was given about a month to put together the paper, which would then be transferred to our digital media class to be turned into a magazine article spread that we would design ourselves. This was definitely one of the biggest (if not the biggest) project we had ever done in Freestyle and was certainly the longest.
In the early stages, I struggled a lot trying to find a direction for my essay. I had an idea when I started the project, but when that fell through, I didn’t really have a back up. For a large part of our class work periods, I was just trying out angle after angle, but almost all of them didn’t really fit with the material I had, or didn’t make me very passionate. As the due date grew closer, I began to get pretty stressed because though I had bits and pieces of a paper, it still wasn’t one very cohesive piece and I still didn’t have an angle statement.
It actually ended up being a conversation with my mom, when she filled in parts of the story that I hadn’t been aware of, that things start to click together. Over the next few days, I asked Abby Bennett, Stella’s mom, for an interview to help fill some of the gaps, changed my angle statement into something more solid, and re-outlined my essay with a fresh perspective on what I was focusing on. It took a few late nights of writing, but once everything started coming together, it was so rewarding.
I think that this process of writing really nailed into my head that writing is not a one and done type of deal. It really is drafts upon drafts of writing and writing and ideas, trying to find the direction and idea that would be the best. It also showed me that I could push through hard things and if I kept going at something, I could eventually accomplish it.
Animated Documentary
While we were doing the written project in English, we were simultaneously creating an animated documentary of our subject using our video. Unlike previous projects, we were doing this completely solo and create an animation that matched a prewritten story line. All of the big animations had previously been done in a group work and nearly all of our other animations had free range for us to pick what we would like to turn into a story. This project was daunting, but the knowledge that several years of animation students had done this before was very comforting.
My first step for the animation was to narrow down what parts of the interview with Stella that I wanted to use for the animation. I spent a few class periods just cutting down a very lengthy interview (nearly 20 minutes) into something I felt was more attainable to animate in the given time. My original audio was supposed to be around 3 minutes long, but throughout the process, I slowly able cut out more to its final length of just under 2 minutes as I realized that some portions were not cohesive with story flow. Once I got the completed audio that I felt like I was confident with, I started story boarding.
I ended up story boarding nearly three times. The first storyboard had some good basic elements, but about two weeks into the ideas I had for the original animation, motivation was at an all time low and it felt like I was just forcing the animation to take a specific shape that it didn’t want to be. I decided to scrap what I had and go back to the drawing board to get a fresh start. My second story board had a lot of similar elements to the first one, but the style for my animations changed a lot as did the content I planned for the scenes themselves. I felt it matched a lot better, so I decided to go forward with that instead. I used the second story board until I started looking over all of my completed animated scenes and unfinished ones and realizing that it had a fair number of substantial gaps. I ended up reopening my audio and interview transcript and I wrote out whatever scenes came to mind of for the audio. This filled in the last missing portions and generally became the final animation I created.
This project, much like the documentary article, had its very big ups and downs. As mentioned earlier, I missed a week of school and scrapped my first animation idea and all the work that went with it, so I lost a considerable amount of time that I had to make up. Especially near the end, I had to stay after school a lot in order to finish scenes in the limited time that I had. There was a lot of problem solving that I had to do to make everything work, and several scenes that I spent a fair chunk of time on were cut for sake of cohesiveness, but in the end, I am very proud of the animation that I created. It is probably the best one that I have done this year and I think all of the work I put into it paid off.
Interviewee Biography
Stella Bennett is a 13 year old Los Altos, California native. She is a budding entrepreneur who loves baking, reading, and spending time with her family.
Abby Bennett is the mother of 5 kids. She loves cooking, traveling, and riding horses. When not in hard core mom mode, she is most likely to be found reading a book.
A special thank you to both Stella and Abby for being so accommodating and helpful, even with last minute texts and interviews! You guys are the best!