Before reading my documentary webpage, it’s highly recommended to watch my Documentary Inro Video!
In the making of the video above, I was able to learn how to use Adobe After Effects. Using the various transformations, such as opacity, scale, position, path, and audio levels, I made this Introduction Video come to life!
Introduction + Reflection
“How do you creatively and truthfully portray a significant person, group, place, idea, or issue in the community?”
We got the opportunity to explore the significance of a person, place, idea, or issue in the community by collecting and analyzing primary and secondary sources. This unit emphasizes narrative-style journalism through the research paper we wrote in English class. This was used to design a magazine article and create a short animation that portrays the importance of our subject.
For this Documentary Project, I wanted to focus on the struggles of being an immigrant single parent in the U.S while trying to achieve the American Dream. I believe it’s important to let others know about their experience and how challenging it can be to succeed in the United States under certain immigrant stereotypes. There is a very controversial issue about immigrants and their role in the United States and I wanted to use my subject’s story as a potential answer. There was no one better who could best represent immigrant single parents other than my lovely mother, Maricela Choque. As a witness to her hard work, I decided to share her story through three visual communicative arts.
A photo of Maricela Choque –>
La Realidad
During our English class, we analyzed the structure of profile articles and the importance of the layout. We learned about the Anectodal Lead, Nut graf, Scenes, Chronology, What Lies Ahead, and Ending Quotation. We soon started to brainstorm our ideas and the significant person we wanted to interview. The biggest question we had to answer for this assignment was…
“How does this person matter today?”
I believe my mother’s journey is a common story of many immigrants that come here to the U.S, yet she stands out the most compared to others. She is very important to those in her community and especially to those young children who need guidance during their development from Middle school to High school. Maricela tries her best to become active and be that person the younger generation is able to reach out to for advice.
After brainstorming, we focused on building questions for our interview, and with the help of Premiere Pro, we were able to get the transcription fairly easy. Since my mom’s native language is Spanish and is not as comfortable speaking English, I decided to interview her in Spanish so she would express herself more freely. Then, we moved on to completing our Profile Outline, where we used the transcript and our research resources. We use these two sources and with an understanding of the structure to make our Profile Article.
Documentary Animation
For my animation project, I had the idea to focus on two essential questions that best summarizes my interview with my mother. In general, I mostly focused on her journey to the U.S, her first impressions, challenges, and thoughts of her first five years here. Previous to starting my animation, I took the time to look for inspiration and found various animations with different art styles. I wanted to go for a more simple art style due to the short time span for this project.
Images of animations I used for inspiration!
Using Adobe Photoshop and the Wacom tablet, I was able to digitalize my storyboard for this project. I began to design my main character, who is my mom, with the art style I was thriving for. I mainly focused on getting to my biggest scenes of my animations.
The layers I made in Photoshop
The process of the Documentary Animation in Photoshop!
Image of the editing process of my Documentary Animation in After Effects
Magazine Article
Using the profile article we wrote in English class, we used InDesign to create a magazine article. I was able to use other applications such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, to make patterns for the background and edit a few pictures to make my Magazine Article more professional. I went for a color theme of a few shades of pink and black since I believe it best suited my mom’s loving personality and the challenges she encountered.
Click the image to take a look at my Magazine Article!
Interviewee Bio
For this Documentary unit, I was able to interview my mom, Maricela Choque, who is a self-sacrificing and loving mother of three. She was born in the heart of Peru, Lima, where she grew up with a big family of two brothers and eight sisters. Thanks to her dad, my grandpa, she was able to come to the United States. Her first five years in the United States were the toughest without her partner, my dad, to be there for her. She had to take care of her two daughters while trying to adjust to a new country with new people, new language, and new rules to follow. Since she has been looking for a better job for the past few years, she has finally found one. Her current position is at Isaac Newton Graham Middle School, where she supervises students as well as acts as a mentor to young adults on the rise. Maricela remains the loving mother and hard worker she was five years ago, still living in the Bay Area with her family, and willing to assist those who need it.
Maricela’s employee ID card of Graham Middle School
A photo of Maricela with her youngest child