Introduction and Reflection
For this Junior Documentary Project, we were challenged to answer the question, “How do you creatively and truthfully portray a significant person, group, place, idea, or issue in the community?” With heavy emphasize on narrative-style journalism, students were asked to produce an interview based research paper for English, a magazine article for Digital Media, and finally a unique elective class project. Students developed their skills in researching primary and secondary sources, profiling and interviewing, and furthering their own style and expertise in their specific elective classes.
For my Documentary Project, I decided to interview one of my good friends Maddie Cheng. She is also a student at Mountain View High School, and I became good friends with her when we both joined Key Club. Key Club is the largest student-led community service organization in the world, and we became closer once the two of us decided to take on larger leadership positions. I wanted to profile Maddie because she’s such a huge inspiration to me, and I think her Key Club journey has been quite a memorable one. I can not wait to see what she does with the skills she’s developed in the future once we graduate.
I really valued the experience I gained with interviewing as this has been my first main project that heavily relied on an interview, not just research I found on the internet. This was the first project I used Adobe Animate as well, and I quite like it compared to the old animation software I’ve been using up until now. However, I know that I still have much more room to improve with all the Adobe applications considering how much they have to offer. Personally, I also really enjoyed seeing what Maddie had to say because we’ve been in this club together since our Freshman year, but I’ve never really spoken to her about what her favorite aspects of it are, or who her inspiration was.
English
For English, I wrote a narrative profiling research paper about Maddie, which follows her journey from back when she was a Freshman, all the way to her goals and plans for the future.
Animation
For the Animation part of this Documentary Project, I decided to create a short animation. I chose the most important parts of the 30 minute interview and summed it up within two minutes. To animate, I used Adobe Animate for the first time, and although it had a learning curve, I think it’s a very good program for animation.
Process
Below are some images of my first animatic sketches and final color design.
Final Video
Here is my animation video.
Magazine Article
This magazine article was created in Adobe InDesign, and I decided to go with a purple and white theme because those are our Key Club division Colors. This was overall a very time consuming project but I’m quite proud of how it turned out.