Introduction and Reflection
For this project, we needed to learn how to tell a story about a person creatively through a documentary. The person needs to be interesting a relevant today and we needed to share their story and their perspective.The project was split into two different parts, the film and the essay which tells the story through research and quotes from the interview in text form. The film tells the story more visually through the person’s story and experiences with direct audio from their interview.
Our first task was to find a topic which was pretty difficult. I wanted to tell a story that was relevant and actually interesting. For me, I decided to make my project about immigration into the US since there are so many different types of people and cultures here. Then, we needed to interview different people so me and my partner, Jonah Greenbaum, interviewed 3 community members: Derek Maclean, Sammy Torbey, and Sung Lee. They were chosen because they are all from different places and they are also from places that you don’t hear about as often. We see a lot of information about people immigrating from countries like Mexico and Honduras which makes the stories that we tell more unique than others that are often shown. We interviewed them each with the same questions to compare and contrast the different experiences that they had with moving to America from different countries. Finally, we edited together the interviews to get the final product.
I really like how this project turned out and I think it showed my improvement in both english and film. I put a lot of work into both of the assignments and it really payed off. For film, this was the first time that we had recorded our own audio which is a really useful skill. On top. of that, we learned the many different types of shots that are used for interviews and will be useful in the future. Being able to conduct an interview is one of the most useful skills in filmmaking and one of the most common job offers that you will get. This also helped us get better at using our audio recorder and mastering audio in premiere pro. One mistake we made was positioning the microphone in the wrong place so that you could hear wind for half of the entire interview. That was definitely a lesson that we have learned and will know for the future. However, the technical skills were not all that we learned. This lesson also taught me a lot about where everyone in our community comes from and all of the different experiences that they have been through. It really makes you think about everyone that you might know who immigrated to America and their story. Overall, I’m really happy with how this project went and it was a very educational experience for me.
The 3 Interviewees:
Derek Maclean – Derek is a pharmaceutical scientist living in Silicon valley. He grew up in northern scotland on an island called the Isle of Lewis. He then moved to the U.S. after he got his phD in Chemistry at the university of Edinburgh and has now settled down with his wife and two kids.
Sammy Torbey- Sammy grew up in Lebanon during the civil war and moved to canada when he was 19. He now works at google in Mountain View, California and is raising a family.
Sung Lee – Sung is a Korean immigrant to the U.S. and moved from South Korea to America when he was just 7. Because of this, he has adopted a lot of American culture. However, since then, Sung has moved to England which has even further changed him.
My Article
Or, click here (issuu doesn’t appear to be working for me so I included a link to it on google drive).
Film
This is the workspace of the premiere pro project for my film. The bottom right is all of the clips in the timeline and the top right is the preview. This project taught me a lot about how to edit films and especially how to edit audio for films. This was the first time that I had edited audio for my films and it helped me learn a lot like how to smoothly edit different audio clips together and how to line up an audio file to a video file.