February 2022 – April 2022
“How do you creatively and truthfully portray a significant person, group, place, idea, or issue in the community?”
Introduction and Reflection
The Junior Documentary Project requires us to portray a person, group, place, or issue, and gather primary and secondary sources to help develop more perspective about the given topic as well as show its significance of it in the community.
This unit was one of the most challenging units I had experienced so far. In the previous units all three of our classes have collaborated before, but this was much different. In English class, we were told that we were going to find someone to interview, and eventually write a paper about this topic. In Digital Media, we started to learn how to use InDesign, a desktop publishing page layout designing software, that we would later use to design books, posters, and magazine pages. Finally, in Design, we would put together our work from the two other classes and make a book, using Adobe InDesign and our written paper from our English class.
Design Production
Before we started to create our book in Design class, we learned about CRAP principles. CRAP stands for contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity. These four principles are essential to designing anything and making sure everything looks cohesive. If you use too many fonts, colors, and sizes of things it won’t look as professional as it can be.
Once we learned this, we jumped right into designing our book on InDesign. We had a lot of creative freedom in designing our books which scared me at first, and I was stuck many times thinking of new layouts for each page. I am very glad InDesign has a feature of using junk text to fill up a page, helping me visualize exactly what my book would look like when it is all filled out. Overall, I felt a little rushed with finishing my book, and I know it could have turned out better. However, this is the first project I have finished with InDesign and I know I can only improve in the future.
Designing this book was very challenging, but I am grateful for my peers in Design class who provided endless support with helping me come up with more ideas. Other than creating the layout for this book, we also had to write a paper in English class to fill it. I am not a writer, and coming up with grammatically correct sentences and cohesive paragraphs was very difficult for me, and I ended up spending many hours working on it the day it was due to make the essay longer. I would not have been able to pull off my last-minute changes without all of my friends being so supportive and rushing to help me edit my paper.
Interviewee Bios
Christine Weeks, a mom, nurse, and overall caretaker at heart, has been working in the healthcare industry since 2008. Weeks gives us more information on why the pandemic was so physically and mentally draining. Not only was Weeks so helpful with answering my questions for this project, but also is the mom to my best friend, and I like to consider her my other mom. I am so glad I was able to share her story during this unit.
Lydia Weeks was my second interviewee for this project to help me get another perspective on how the pandemic affected Christine Weeks. Not only is she the daughter of Weeks, but is also my best friend. I am so grateful for the help she provided for this unit, with reviewing my essays, helping me come up with new ideas, and having someone to bounce ideas off of, she did as much work as I did for this project and I can never thank her enough.
This was the most challenging unit so far, but it helped me learn so much that I can’t wait to practice more in the future.