Documentary

Behind The Scenes

Introduction

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

For the Junior Documentary Project, students will portray an intriguing person, group, place, idea, or issue, gathering primary and secondary research sources to develop a distinct perspective about their subject’s significance in the community and/or world. The research-based paper from English serves as the copy for the magazine article in Design and a film, commercial, and website. This unit emphasizes narrative-style journalism.

In my personal documentary project, I wanted to create something timeless and meaningful. Conveniently me and my partner Tai had the perfect story to tell. My father, Richard Rathbun, Is a huge inspiration to me and has lived what I found to be, one of the most interesting lives ever.

English/Digital Media

In our English class, we were tasked to write a profile alongside creating our documentary project. Seeing as my documentary was sort of a profile it was easy to write an article similar to the topic.

Click here for Profile Article!

film Productions

We began our documentary unit in film by creating Mockumentaries or “Mock” documentaries. This project was meant to help us learn the technical skills behind filming a documentary without having to worry about the content or story. In our personal mockumentary, we decided to make it about the increasing gas prices happening at the time. In order to follow the style of a “Mock” documentary, we added dramatic visuals and sound effects.

Mockumentary

Following our mockumentary, it was time to take the skills we practiced and put them to real use. We started this process by watching the different styles of documentaries and brainstorming what story we wanted to follow. After coming up with somewhat of a story me and my partner Tai got to interview.

Gene interview (behind the scenes)

Throughout this process, we faced a lot of challenges with the story we wanted to pursue. We shortly learned that the more and more interviews we conducted the more confusing the information got. While we only had to originally conduct 4 interviews we ended up having 7, in which we interviewed Richard 3 separate times to get our information straight.

After conducting all of our interviews and finally getting our information straight we got to editing. While editing we really found difficulty in fitting all of this information together. We felt like we got so much and had so many stories to tell that it was going to be a challenge to fit it into a short documentary. In order to get the most out of all of our interviews, we ended up creating a documentary that summarizes our story and goes in-depth during impactful parts.

Editing (behind the scenes)

A journey through the past – A short documentary