Introduction
The documentary project was for students to go out into the community learn about a person or organization’s story. This project was first introduced in English class and I was very nervous. I had never done a project like this before but in English class, the students were supposed to brainstorm interesting topics that interested them. Then we developed questions about the chosen subject and did online research that was related to the subject. I had to interview a person and record the conversation with them. With the sources that I looked over, I had to bring together quotes from my interview and my online research about the topic to write an essay. The essay would later on be included into a magazine that students learned to create in digital media.
Eventually, I was inspired to do my project about Rod Verhulp who has worked for companies in finance and I had heard him talk about his experiences that he had during his career. Through the entire process of the documentary project, Rod Verhulp provided a lot of support especially during the interview process and when it came to feedback on the essay. His life had a lot of important messages in them and to convey them effectively was the biggest challenge. The main message was that hardwork and integrity were the important building blocks to his success in his career.
English Production
The production process in English was focused about processing our brainstorm ideas and explore more about those ideas. Having my subject be Rod Verhulp was a new kind of task that required for me to come up with questions about his life and research topics that were related to his career. The project allowed for me to learn more about his life as he got to work with big companies like Yahoo!, Equinix, and more. Learning more about his childhood on the farm was a insightful experience because a lot of the disicpline he learned early on had supported him later on in his life.
Connecting his achievements and what supported him to be successful in life into words was a struggle for me. I ended writing four different drafts because the previous ones weren’t very good. Fortunately, Rod Verhulp was very kind and patient with me during this process. We talked through email, text, and calling over the phone to help lay out the essay to be more straightforward and the topics set up more logically. I appreciate all the effort that he gave into this project and help make it better than before. I would also like to thank Mr.Greco, my family, and my peer reviewers in giving their much needed feedback on my essay.
Click Here to get to the PDF to essay:
Digital Media Production
In Digital Media class, we were taught how to use InDesign to make a magazine for the documentary. It would have the content from the essay and the pictures we gathered. The background I made for my magazine was made using different shapes and I imported custom colors from Adobe Colors. For the digital graphic designs, I had to use Illustrator using the pen tool to make anchor points. These anchors points would connect to each other and it made it easy to create objects that didn’t have strict geometric shape. With this tool in Illustrator, I could draw shapes, lines, and objects. Throughout the entire process, I think the most important thing to keep in my mind was to lock layers that I wasn’t currently using to manage the layers better. When I had forgotten to do that, I would often grab layers that I didn’t want to move.
In the making of the GDEs, I wanted to make them somewhat related to the farm and then some were made to for decoration. The sun and the notebook artwork hadn’t gone into my final magazine because I couldn’t find a place where those objects would fit without overcrowding. The great thing about making these graphic designs in Illustrator was that transfering them onto InDesign where the magazine was being created was easy. I could copy and paste the content of each GDE individually onto InDesign which I definitely appreciated the program for.
Click here on the image to access the Documentary Magazine
Animation Production
Within our elective class at Freestyle Academy, we had to create an animation that was related to our documentary. I had decided to take a 2 minute audio clip from my interview recording with Rod Verhulp. The visual animations that I made were less centered around his farm life compared to my magazine. In general, it is about what defines his happiness and his perspectives on how people manage their finances. His career was heavily focused on managing finances of the company as he worked with a team. The audio clip that I used was about why people spend their money the way they do and his thoughts on why some struggle to find happiness even with money.
The storyboard was to help sequence the events with what was visually happening. Having a storyboard was very helpful because it helped me to be more organized in knowing what I was going to draw. The drawings here were pretty similar to what was included in the final video but I added more detail later. Not adding too much detail here was important because I wanted to get started on animating as soon as possible.
Animated Documentary Video
In the picture, I had to bring all my animations that I made on various Photoshop files into After Effects. In After Effects, I added the audio from my interview and managed my frame lengths there. The great thing about this program is that I could add fade in and out effects to my frames. Towards the end of the video, I had added those effects so it could transition smoother and help the viewer know that the video was about to reach the end. I had made 366 frames all compiled into After Effects which had taken a lot of time. I wanted to take a screen shot of all the frames into one screenshot of the After Effects file but the frames were very small, it made it very hard to see.
Here are some of the screenshots from Photoshop that show more of the drawing process of making the scenes.
The scene that took the most time to make in animation class was probably the scene that had the coin flip. Originally, the scene only had the coin flip with a blank purple background. I thought that I could add something more to make the scene more visually interesting so I decided to add grass and clouds so the viewer could have more too look at. These scenes that I made for the documentary were my favorite to draw.
Final Video
Interviewees
Rod Verhulp
Rod Verhulp worked in finance for over 40 years. He is retired now since 2017 and wants to spend a lot of time with his family. He wants to be a role model for his children by living through example.
Click here to access the pdf to my interview transcript.
Reflection
From the doing the documentary project, it really made me communicate a lot with people who were involved in the project. I thought it was cool that the project in my English class had motivated me to keep doing revisions and making multiple drafts until I was happy with it. The process of writing it definitely made me reach out to people outside of Freestyle Academy for feedback in making the content of it better. Then using what we learned from Digital Media class to put the essay into a Magazine took a lot of time but afterwards I liked how it turned out. I included graphic designs that were inspired from what I learned from my interviewee and that took a lot of time too but it was worth it. When the documentary project extended into Animation class, I had to animate scenes. I had to improvise when my animation had a lot of awkward spaces in between so I had to create additional scenes to help close the spaces that didn’t have as much. The take away that I learned from this project was even though there were often challenges that had set me back, it was important to continue working. I am proud that my interviewee subject, Rod Verhulp had gotten the chance to read my essay and he was proud of the work.