The Documentary unit at Freestyle academy is the largest one of Junior year. Its focus is to learn how to tell the story of people we have talked to, through various mediums.
This project, like many freestyle projects, spans all three classes. We start off in english, finding an interesting person and recording an interview with them. Then writing a profile style article about them. Next, in Digital Media, we put the text of our article into Adobe InDesign, and integrate photos and design elements. Finally, in Animation class, we make a short animation. Editing audio from our interviewee and adding animated visuals to make the story come to life.
Bios
Paula Perez
I had the privilege of interviewing her. She is an activist. Deeply connected to the community of Castro/Mistral elementary school, advocated for measure V (rent control) and was a founding member of the MV Solidarity Fund.
Tania O’Connel
A family friend and friend of Paula’s. Mom, of kids at Castro, she gave great insight into Paula and the impact on the community.
Click here to read my article in full!
Documentary Animation
Next thing I had to create was my documentary animation, based of of the voice recordings I took of my interviewee, Paula Perez. This production process included a few steps:
- Audio editing
- Visual planning
- Storyboarding
- Animating the final product
Audio Editing
First I edited my hour long interview with mrs. Perez, down to a 10 minute clip. There was so much of her story, and quotable moments that I wanted to include! Sadly 10 minutes is a lot of animation. If you were animating 5 frames per second (which is pretty low quality) multiply that times 600 seconds in 10 minutes, you’d have to draw 3000 frames!! We were encouraged to do a 1-2 minute animation, but even after days of editing, I was only willing to whittle it down to five. These five minutes tell the story Paula and the solidarity fund. I was sadly unable to include the parts about CAT and the fight for rent control. Please read my documentary to learn about those!
Visual Style
To determine the visual style of my animation, I compiled videos and pictures to take inspiration from. I knew I wanted this animation to be emotional and colorful, as well as simple.
Story Boarding
This process was a bit more difficult than usual, because I had to figure out how to visualize some very complex social and political issues. I think its kinda funny that for some things, I was trying to create these weird metaphors. Like near the end of my animation there’s a drawing of airport security, to demonstrate how many barriers there are on the path to financial aid from the government. And for other scenes, I just dew piles of money, because the organization was raising money.
Final Product
Here is my finished animation! You may notice it is quite different from my storyboard. Primarily, the colors are a bit more subdued. I also had to add quite a few scenes to fill the time. All the audio is in Spanish, so I hope simultaneously watching the animation and reading the english subtitles works out ok for you.