[How do you creatively and truthfully portray a significant person, group, place, idea, or issue in the community?]
For my documentary project, I first wanted to interview the co-founder of an AI tech health startup (which I get to do later). However, I was mostly stuck at home for when we were assigned to do interviews while I was recovering from a surgery, so I instead interviewed my dad.
English
In my article, I wanted to talk about physical and mental recovery after a major incident in one’s life. He’d recently gotten compound fractures on both of his legs (where the bone penetrates the skin). And since he was an athlete, it affected him greatly— he could no longer compete professionally, nor could he do his job as a personal trainer.
I had a lot of fun writing the article, even if I was limited by time and health. I ended up going back and interviewing the AI healthcare startup cofounder afterwards, but it was more for a personal project rather than school.
I think that my article is lacking in evidence and analysis. If I could go back, I would definitely put in more time, and get my interview done sooner so that I could have done it before my surgery. With better time management and planning, I could have produced the article I had envisioned .Still, though, I’m really happy with the issue I ended up portraying, because no matter which topic I did, they would both be topics I enjoy writing about, and topics which aren’t covered enough (in my opinion).
Magazine Article
In Digital Media, we learned how to use Adobe InDesign in order to turn our English articles into a magazine.
It was kind of challenging for me, since I’m not very skilled at designing stuff. That being said, I think it exceeded my expectations. I wish I could go back and take higher quality photos, though, since I struggled to choose which ones looked best— either retake them or at least edit them in photoshop or something.
Animation
For this project, we had to take a snippet from our interviews and animate them.
I’ll admit, this one wasn’t my favourite, and I think it shows. I didn’t have many ideas, and because of the audio portion of my interview I decided on, there wasn’t much story to tell outside of the one being narrated.
I’m super glad we got so much time to work on the project, though, because I don’t think I could have finished it in even a month. My biggest struggle was just coming up with ideas on what to draw— the storyboarding phase took so long by itself (as shown below, of shots that never made it to the final).
Now that it’s done, though, I’m happy I did it. I think it was great experience in animating someone else’s story, not just my own. And I got better at telling an actual story, whereas in the narrative project, my part was mostly just mindless parkour.