Introduction
The documentary unit at Freestyle Academy tasked us to go outside of our school district to document anything of our choosing. This process would consist of extensive preliminary research and learning how to use InDesign to create a magazine article. For my documentary, I took the time to weigh out my options, such as a dentist, or a restaurant owner, but decided on the architect who built my house. It was fascinating discovering the mind who helped build and design the house I’ve lived in my whole life. Andrew Young, the ceo and co-founder of Young and Borlik architects is a humble, brilliant, and innovative leader. His stories inspired me and changed my perspective to understand the importance of buildings.
Here’s some of the prep work:
As well as the final product and my interviewees:
Film
Aside from doing a documentary for my english and digital media class, I did another one for film. When tackling this project with my partner Darian, we struggled to decide on an idea, until he pitched how he’s apart of a Dungeons and Dragons group. I wasn’t thrilled at the idea, but I knew it would be easily accessible to document under a short amount of time. Thus we dived into the world of D&D and discovered how it changed people’s lives.
however… before we got to the good stuff to practice we did a mockumentary! A mockumentary is a fake documentary, often using satire to allow filmmakers to explore or make a parody of a documentary. Here’s the one I did in class:
Interviewee bios:
For the real documentary however we needed to interview real people for a real story:
Reflection
Producing any documentary will present some challenges. It’s not easy encapsulating an authentic story, and making the interviewees comfortable enough with you to share their story. However my key take away from all this was that despite how it may be intimidating to reach out into your community being a no name, you’re never entirely alone. From interviewing an architect, to high school students, and teachers, I’ve come to recognize the main difference about them is their jobs.
Everyone I’ve interviewed has aspirations for their future, to do good, and most importantly want to have a sense of community. Everyone has their own obstacles and unique stories, if you just reached out you’d realize nobody is perfect. It was also pleasing to relearn that imperfections is what creates good character, and imperfect stories make the best headlines. It was nice seeing how all stories are more similarity than you may think.