Documentary

For the Junior Documentary Project, we were prompted to answer the question: “How do you creatively and truthfully portray a significant person, group, place, idea, or issue in the community?” In this unit, we portrayed an intriguing person, group, place, idea, or issue of our choice, gathering primary and secondary research sources to develop a distinct perspective about our subject’s significance in the community and/or world. We also created a research-based paper for English that served as the copy for the magazine article in Design. This unit allowed us to develop our skills in emphasizing narrative-style journalism.

“Playing Like a Girl”

I decided to focus my own documentary project on women in sports, as I feel that it is a topic that deserves more attention and has problems need to be brought to light. Two major ideas that have been a consistent part of my life are athletics and feminism, and although the two might not seem to have any correlation, they have just about everything in common.

I grew up training competitive gymnastics and have been involved in track and field since I was in fourth grade. As I got older and started learning more about feminism, I was able to reflect upon my own experience in athletics as a woman, as well analyze many of the events that occur in the sports field through a specific lense. My goal for the documentary project was to showcase the perseverance and power of female athletes while shining a light on the many issues that plague women’s sports.

If I could sum up everything I learned from my documentary journey in one sentence, it would be the following: women are strong as h*ll. We live in a society that continuously puts down everyone that doesn’t fit into the status quo. People are constantly oppressed because of uncontrollable factors, such as gender, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation. A valuable lesson I learned from this project was that people don’t succeed in spite of these factors; they succeed because of these factors. People who are taught they need to hide their identity in order to succeed not only accomplish the impossible, but they do so proudly and set a path for others to follow. The women I interviewed and researched are all incredibly resilient and have accomplished amazing things despite society telling them that they couldn’t. They are not strong in spite of being women; they are strong because they are women.

In my Documentary Project, I showcased many women who persevered despite challenges that they faced in their respective sport, focusing on three young women who left their own legacy in their community.

Click on the picture below to view my documentary project magazine

Click on the picture below to view my documentary paper on its own

Behind the Scenes…

Bellow is a collection of isolated elements and the workspaces that showcase how my documentary magazine was put together.

This is one of the graphic design elements in my magazine.
This is one of the graphic design elements in my magazine.
One of the pictures in my documentary magazine before and after editing on Photoshop.
My InDesign workspace while working on my magazine: this program was used to help all my elements come together in a magazine format.
My Illustrator workspace while working on my magazine: this program was used to create my graphic design elements.