Introduction & Reflection
The documentary project was one of the longest projects we’ve been assigned in freestyle so far and provided a great opportunity for us to grow. Our documentary project in Film gave us a lot of freedom, allowing us to choose what subject and what style/mode of documentary we’d create, with the only constraints being the end date and that we need to work in pairs. While this led to a lot of flexibility, there were still plenty of issues with the process.
Because I lead a mundane life, it was difficult to decide on a topic for my documentary, seeing as I don’t do many interesting things or get out of the house too much. Fortunately, I had connections to a local volunteer organization, so my film partner and I decided on that. Ultimately, the project did not go how I wished it could have, due to some fundamental issues with permissions surrounding the filming of certain people, it was still complete, which was enough for me.
One of the main things I learned from this project is the importance of scheduling and organizing with others. Communicating with outside organizations and my film partner was key in making our film possible, especially in order to respect everyone’s time. Another important thing is to research the subject thoroughly before committing, as the organization wanted us to not film the guests, despite our good intentions. This threw a comically sized wrench into our plans, as our ideas for the film relied on showing the guests and how much the organization did, but ultimately was limited to just showing the volunteers’ work in an almost advertisement-like way. This issue caused a great deal of stress during the filming process, and ultimately I felt like caused my idea to fail, and the rest of my work on it to just be trying to glue the bits we had together.
Elective Class Production
Mockumentary
Before working on our documentary, to learn the process and necessary skills for creating a documentary film our teacher assigned the class to create a Mockumentary. This process was very watered down compared to the actual documentary, as our interviews were of each other, and we could just make things up.
With these new skills, we were set off to produce our documentaries in groups of 2.
Documentary Production
The process of creating our documentary can be broken down into 3 steps:
Planning and Preproduction
As stated earlier, I went into the documentary project having no idea of what I should document. So I set myself 2 criteria for my subject. 1: It should be something relevant to our local community. 2: It should be something interesting. With these two criteria in mind, I started to dig through my memory and search for anything that’d work. Eventually, I remembered back to middle school and my volunteering experience at Hope’s Corner. So I brought it up to my partner, she thought it sounded good, and then we made our pitch to our teacher. He gave us the green light, so we continued planning. Our first step was to plan out who we wanted to interview. Since I knew some of the people there, I thought it’d be easier for us to interview those people. Fortunately for me, I knew the head of volunteers and many of the veteran volunteers at the organization, which made things much easier. After planning who we wanted to interview, we communicated with them and decided on a time and location for the interviews. Once everything was decided, we were able to start production.
Production
With extensive preproduction, the production itself was just a matter of showing up prepared for the dates we scheduled. One regret with our production was our limitations on what/where we could film, particularly with our B-roll. While editing I realized that I could tell a story with our B-roll alone and that the focus of our B-roll was too focused on what our interviewees were talking about, rather than filming B-roll of our interviewees themselves. Our process of filming interviews was to find the interviewee, greet them and prepare them for what to expect, rig the microphone, and set up a spot where we’d film. This process took a little while to get used to, but up becoming faster and faster the more we did it. Overall, this was the shortest and easiest part of the documentary-making process, but also the part that had the most unpredictability.
Postproduction
The first step in our postproduction was to structure our documentary. I personally wanted to have an observational-style documentary with minimal interviews and mostly visuals, but eventually, my partner and I settled on a more expository documentary. This meant we had to structure our interviews in a way where we’d explain what Hope’s Corner is and why it is important at the bare minimum. With this decision, we created transcripts of our interviews so we could streamline our process and write our documentary before editing it.
Example Transcript from one of our interviews.
Finally, with all our clips and interviews, we edited our film together. The main issue we had was trying to find visuals that would match what our interviewees were saying, however, we were able to work around parts of this. We wanted to cut our interviews into each other, but there were a few annoyances that got in the way, like the phrasing our interviewees used or inhaling loudly before speaking. I personally felt that it could use more polish, but I was already disappointed that it was already so far from my desired vision, so I just decided to leave it as it was. I found this to be the easiest part of the process, and we were actually able to finish on time.
Final Product
Interviewee Bios
Sharon Langlois was our first interviewee. She is currently a stay-at-home mom who regularly volunteers at Hope’s Corner. She has been volunteering at Hope’s Corner for the past 3-4 years and has risen to the position of kitchen coordinator.
Mike Hacker is also a regular volunteer at Hope’s Corner, while not the head of volunteers, he regularly leads the program on the weekend. He has been going to Hope’s Corner for a long time and knows many of the guests.
Alice Cota is the head of volunteers at Hope’s Corner. She is present every weekend and handles all volunteer-related affairs, as well as handling communication with the service. She has been volunteering since the start of Hope’s Corner and still continues to volunteer to this day.
Mikey was somewhat of the inspiration for this project. His story is known through Hope’s Corner community, yet still remains a bit of a mysterious figure. He was abandoned at a young age, but through the efforts of some volunteers at Hope’s Corner he was reunited with his mom after 39 years of separation. He originally was a guest, but eventually volunteered more and more. Now he currently volunteers at Hope’s Corner and plans on continuing until he is physically unable to.