Documentary

“How do you creatively and truthfully portray a significant person, group, place, idea, or issue in the community?”

For the Documentary Project, students were asked to portray an interesting subjects like a person, place or idea. They were asked to use primary sources and secondary sources to gather different perspectives on their ideas. The research-based paper in English served as the magazine article in Digital Media and a short film in Film class.

Introduction

For the documentary project I originally wanted to do it on lgbtqia+ mental health. However I had a lot o trouble when finding and planning the interviews. One day in Digital Media I thought of the idea to do a documentary on experiences in Germany on both sides during the Cold War.

This project was extremely important to me as my mom grew up in West Berlin during the Cold War, and my grandparents escaped from East Berlin. I did not know my grandparents so this project made me feel closer to them in a way since I was learning more about their history and experiences. Something I valued was being able to hear people talk about stories that aren’t talked about in school very often. In schools we often hear more about the war aspect and tension between the Soviet Union and the USA instead of the actual citizens experiences during this time. This project also allowed me to learn a lot of different techniques in filmmaking that will help me for the rest of my life.

Story

In my documentary project I interviewed and researched experiences during the Cold War. I interviewed multiple people from both East Germany and West Germany to get their perspectives on how it was like to grow up during the Cold War. Throughout the documentary paper I focused more on the differences between both sides and specifically how this affects Germany today. In my documentary film I decided to focus more on the interviewees individual stories from their lives in their respective sides of Germany. There are a lot of differences because of the form of government in both sides.

English Paper

Magazine Article

Film

Mockumentary

The mockumentary was a fun project designed to help us learn about the basics of documentary film making. This was my favorite project this year and I had so much fun even though this was filmed during the power outages so it was a little bit more difficult than we had planned. I definitely learned a lot in terms on natural lighting, sound and editing, which I am very grateful for.

The Documentary Project was a great learning experience. Since we had only worked with sound once before, in our mockumentaries, I learned a lot about how to edit and record sound. We also had to experiment with a lot more natural lighting and my personal favorite was learning that you can color code in Premiere! The biggest challenge that we faced was definitely finding b-roll. Since our subject was about the Cold War it was very difficult to find any b-roll that we could shoot. There was also a big lack of free for use b-roll so eventually we had to give up on using non-copyrited footage and images and used whatever we could find.

Process

Thanks

Thank you to my classmates, teachers, family and friends for supporting me throughout my adventures in this documentary project. I especially want to thank Mr. Greco for being the first English teacher I have had to actually give me feedback on my work so that I can improve and I appreciate how supportive he is.