Evan Segelke

Documentary

Introduction and Reflection

How do you portray a person, group, or idea accurately and creatively? That was the question we had to answer during this unit.

My project began when I started working with Akhand, a fellow film student, who was passionate about journalism. The plan was to make a documentary film on the local newspapers in our area and try to showcase their importance as well as their challenges. Unfortunately, the world was hit with a global pandemic and we were no longer able to film in person. This meant that local journalism became the topic of each for our individual English papers. As for my documentary film, I interviewed the only people I had access to, my family, about the most pressing topic, quarantine.

an introduction video I made in digital media class for my documentary

I overall felt like I learned a lot about documenting reality in creative and engaging ways. Previously, we had mostly been coming up with stories and ideas from our minds, but this unit we had to tell a story using what was around us. That took some of the pressure off of pre-production but it also meant we had to think more about how we wanted to portray people and what the take away would be. It was a fun project, I tried to make a documentary film somewhat entreating or up-lifting because the quarantine was a downer, and I’m proud of what I was able to accomplish.

Film

Documentary film

Well, no one was able to do their original idea for this project. Akhand and I couldn’t meet in person with anyone to film interviews so we had to go our separate ways. For my film, I interviewed the only people I had access to which was my family, and I interviewed them about the hot topic on everyone’s mind: Quarantine. I’m well aware that there is a bunch circulating about how terrible everything is at the time I am writing this; so with my film, I tried to make something a bit more light-hearted and entertaining. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

My Documentary
My editing interface in PremierePro
This is how I color corrected and graded
This is what my timeline looked like in PremierePro

Mockumentary film

In our film class, we first learned a lot about the skills of a Documentary when we created a Mockumentary in groups of three. Our only real requirement for this project, other than interviewing each member of the group, was that it had to be about freestyle. My group voted to do it about me starting a cult because people had been wanting me to start a cult ever since the narrative unit. I was out-voted so I went along and we used part of my original idea by having a twist at the end. I don’t really like seeing myself on screen or hearing my own voice and both of those two things are prominent in the mockumentary. My group did make a pretty entertaining documentary about my cult though. If you want to see the mockumentary for yourself:

My groups Mockumentary Film

English

In English, we wrote a research paper documenting something significant in our community. Originally it was planned that this topic would be the same as our film project, but due to Covid-19 circumstances, we had to change our topics. My English paper is on the topic my film partner and I originally had planned which is local journalism, focusing on the Mountian View Voice, our local paper. My partner Akhand and I continued to interview the Voice staff using virtual zoom meetings during the quarantine. We then separately did secondary research and compiled our own research papers. I then translated that paper into the magazine featured below for my digital media class.

Click on this to view my English paper
My magazine article

Photogallery

Interviewee Bios

My Mother

This is my mother, a family practice doctor who has been working from home with patients through applications such as Zoom. She typically is employed to work on a Google campus to provide Google employees with healthcare.

My Brother

This is my brother Nathan who normally attends Cornell College in Iowa. However, due to quarantine, he has had to due college work virtually from home to finish off his freshman year.

My Father

This is my father who works as a process development engineer at a company called Credence Medsystems. He works with his company to create syringes with a special safety mechanism so that the needles won’t accidentally infect the doctors or nurses who use them and can’t be reused which can cause infection.