Introduction
For the Documentary Unit, I was asked to research a local person, group of people, or place. There were three different projects that came out of this unit a documentary Film, a profile research article in English, and an Indesign magazine article. These projects challenged creativity, writing techniques, and interviewing techniques. Specifically, in Film we learned about documentary techniques such as rule of thirds, depth of field, and lighting. I knew I wanted to create a documentary film about happiness. As I shaped the idea I focused on the concept of happiness from the older generation. For English, I reached out to a past teacher and wanted to highlight their impact through an article. Lastly, I was able to put this written article from English into a graphically designed magazine.
English
In English, I decided to research the importance of community by focusing on my former choir teacher Jill Denny, and the community she has made for not only me but many around the world. Jill Denny is a 27-year choir director who has impacted the world through different values and morals that she teaches in her everyday classes.
The key topic of this essay was to highlight how Jill Denny’s choir program influences more than her students and their community, but the whole world. It was interesting to hear Jill’s stories and the inspiration behind the values that she teaches in her classes.
This essay was able to be incorporated into an InDesign project, where we learned different techniques on how to make our magazine look appealing. It was cool seeing how creativity had no limits and you could put anything into the magazine. For example, I wanted to add a piece of sheet music to the background of the article and was able to blend it by turning down the opacity and placing the layer in the back.
Jill Denny is an inspiration to all and has put tremendous effort into making every voice heard in the community.
Digital Media
After finishing my essay in my Digital Media class we learned how to use Indesign and created our own magazines. We first learned with the teacher creating a mock magazine then were sent off to create our own. From the beginning, I knew I wanted to incorporate a piece of music as the background. I thought about choir’s most memorable songs and downloaded a PDF of it. From there I placed the image, set it to the back, and turned down the opacity so it wouldn’t overload the text. I added music notes and images to help support the texts. Overall I am very happy about how this article turned out.
Film
Before we began the Documentary Unit in the film we practiced our new film techniques through a fun mockumentary project. Many of these films had inside jokes with the Freestyle community as the prompt was to have it filmed at Freestyle Academy. My film highlighted a pre-English class warmup of meditation. My classmates and I were able to ironically share how mediation changed our lives.
The documentary project’s final part was creating the film, “Happy Hearts”. This was around a five-week process that consisted of multiple interviews a week. Submitting transcripts, two different angled shots, and audio became a familiar process. The inspiration for this film came originally as I wanted to interview different people and have them answer one sentence about what makes them happy. The topic of happiness is too broad so with further discussion with my film teacher and partner we decided to highlight a specific age group. The previous generations have experienced more of life and have more wisdom to give. Hearing each person’s stories and advice would leave me feeling inspired after every interview.
After working with Premiere Pro to make this movie, I feel I’ve gained experience with the program. The “Happy Hearts” editing process is shown below.
A difficult aspect of making this movie was synchronizing the interview audios with the videos. I used two cameras to get a variety of perspectives such as a close-up and a medium shot. Then added a microphone to each interviewee so I could record their voice using an audio recorder as this audio was better quality compared to the camera. I had to precisely synchronize the audio with the video in order to ensure that the sound clips looked good. When I was able to get them to match, it was really satisfying.
In order to be fully prepared for my interviews, my partners and I created lists of questions we wanted to ask the interviewees. Also shown below is an example of questions we would ask. To ensure the peoples words would align we kept things broad so people could share their stories and not feel constricted.
Interviewee Bios
Reflection
Overall this project not only taught me so much but was a true inspiration for me. I was able to learn so much with different Adobe applications such as Premiere Pro, InDesign, and more with the WordPress website. I now have developed skills that I will be able to take with me for the rest of my life. I am so grateful for how Freestyle pushed me to do my best and help supply me with amazing mics, cameras, and tripods. Without freestyle, I wouldn’t have been able to produce my own magazine, interview amazing people, produce my own documentary, and write my essay.
