Documentary

Introduction and Reflection

For the Documentary project, we were challenged to represent a person’s story creatively through a profile article in English and a documentary book in Design. In this unit, we learned how to interview people and research topics for the narrative-style journalism profile we wrote in English class. We used the profile article in our books, as well as photographs and graphic design elements to convey the subject’s story.

For my documentary, I interviewed and wrote about my neighbor Mrs. Terry, a retired elementary school teacher, about her career, her personal life, and what she is doing now. I valued learning about how to ask important questions during an interview and how to write a journalism style article. The article was different from anything I have written before and I struggled with finding my angle. Overall it was a good learning experience because I had to write in a new style and structure.

In my profile article, I included scenes and anecdotes to illustrate the subject’s story. I also used meaningful quotes from both the subject from the interview and from research sources to support my angle.

Documentary Book

In Design, we made books about the same documentary subject and we used the English profile article as the text. We used Indesign to put the book together, as well as Illustrator for the graphic design elements and Photoshop for the photos. When I went to interview Mrs. Terry, I brought my camera and took pictures to put in my book. It was challenging to make the book without already having the text, since we were working on both at the same time. I ended up putting in a lot of photos since I had less text than I thought I would, but I like how the format of a photo on the left and text on the right looks.

Interviewee Bio