Introduction
After the Narrative Project, it was time for the longest project for the year, the Documentary project in which we had to interview some person or some business or anything in order to create a documentary about them and the issue that relates to what they are doing. In the span of 4 months, I was able to write a research paper as well as creating a book with design elements using the research paper for the write and finally, I condense the book into a magazine. Overall, this project took what felt like forever, so here’s my process of the entire project
Before we even got into the process of creating the research paper or start the creation of the book. We had to start with finding the topic. We were asked “How do you creatively and truthfully portray a significant person, group, place, idea, or issue in the community?”. Where we were being asked to find a topic about something or someone that had some sort of significant to an issue that is happening in today. The goal was to make sure that the Documentary brought meaningful insight to an issue where someone who was reading the documentary could take something from the project.
This project was the one that made me and others push outside of their comfort zone in order to achieve the interviews and research that was needed in order to create the research paper and later the other forms of media of the documentary project. First we had to figure out what or who we were going to interview for this is project. In English, we went through the different types of documentary such as the personal documentary about a single person or a documentary about an organization. From the start, I knew I wanted to do a documentary about an organization because I felt like I could do a better job compare to doing about just one person. After figuring out the type of documentary we wanted to do, we had to brainstorm about the place to document. My process to finding my topic was first to look around the community for local business. I started with a list of place I could/wanted to document, a couple of these first ideas were a Taekwondo studio that I worked at, or the homeless shelter in San Jose. Eventually, I went through instagram to look at different small businesses in the bay area. That was when I landed on HubOn, which was being ran by a family friend meaning that getting in contact with them would be really easy.
English
Before even the brainstorming part, in english, we went through a book “Seeing Silicon Valley” which mainly was used in order to introduce the documentary and the other part of the documentary of not only writing about a subject but also about an issue that relates to our subject.
First part of the entire project after the brainstorming was in english where we needed to research about not only our subject but an overarching issue that helps explains why our documentary matters. I went through different ideas however most of them didn’t really fit with my subject, so at the end I decided for my issue was about passion and the effects of passion in someone’s job. I found this idea because I found that most small business ran by a person or family was from the passion of something. In this case, HubOn was driven by the passion of plants.
Once we figured out the issue that we wanted to explore, we had to find our sources other than our interviews and subjects. Surprisingly, finding sources was pretty hard because most source either didn’t help answer the question or related to the issue to trail off to something else. For example, I though I had found this really good source about the relationship between work and passion, but then the author just spent half of the article to self-advertise her business. So finding the sources that I wanted to use was pretty difficult, given how many articles led to no where or was highly outdated, by like 16 years, like they were published when I was born.
But once the sources were picked and I did some other research, I started to put interview questions together in preparation of interviews for the co-founders of HubOn, this part compare to researching sources was very easy because with these sources, I now have ideas and also things I wanted to asked based off what I read.
Once I got my interview question written down, I now needed to get my interviews from both Gent and Liony, the two co-founders of HubOn. This part was easy, I was able to get interviews scheduled and the interviews went smoothly, it only took around an hour to an hour and a half to get both interviews done.
One of the people that I interviewed was Liony, one of the CoFounders of HubOn and dealt with mostly of the backend with getting orders, preparing those orders and making sure that website and the processing of new orders and packages went smoothly. Her main passion is gardening which help jump start the business. From starting Gardener which was only a marketplace for plants and turning that into HubOn expanding to also shipping and storing plants through other businesses and themselves.
The other person I interviewed for this project was Gent, who was the one responsible for the front end of the business. His role is to drive and make the delivers bring packages and plants to different businesses for people to pick up or buy. He used to work in different startups including tech and also marketing. He later switch from these jobs to work at HubOn working as the driver and the prompting and marketing HubOn to the public.
After conducting both interviews, I was able to start writing my documentary paper that I would be using in for both the Magazine and also the Book that I was creating in Design. This part was the most time consuming because the writing in this paper had to be really good given that it would be publish into a book and magazine and I really wanted to do a good job because of how large this project was and how important it is. If you want to read my paper, click on the image to the right.
Digital media
After finishing writing the paper, it was time to start putting it into our magazine. I already knew how to use Indesign from using it in Design while making the book so this part of the process was pretty easy given how I already had the GDEs and the layout that I wanted done from the book. So the magazine became a shorter version of book with some editing of the writing to fill on the magazine and some moving around, it was done. This by far was so much more easy compare to the book or the writing.
Overall, the magazine was a whole lot quicker but it still gave me good practice in Indesign for layout and also for just everything in general. If you want to read the my magazine, click to the right
Design
After writing the paper, I then went into design in order to start creating the book. This part also took a quite some time to do because everything needed to look good and I wanted to make sure that my GDEs, my writing and overall appearance was good because this book was going to be publish and could be seen by everyone.
However, It was really fun creating the book because once it was done, it looked sooooo good.
Reflection
Overall, this project was a lot of fun and also gave me a lot of experience in all aspects of the creating process. From the researching and the writing of the paper, it made me really step out of my comfort zone in order to get these interviews and also it helped me practice writing formal research papers. In both design and Digital media, I was able to learn how to use Indesign and the editing process behind creating the magazine and the book which is very helpful if I ever want in the future to create something similar to this with Indesign and layouts.