Documentary
The Documentary is the biggest project in Junior year at Freestyle and definitely the biggest project I have done for school. Over the course of 5 months, students complete various projects in each of their classes to answer the question “How do you creatively and truthfully portray a significant person, group, place, idea, or issue in the community?”.
For this project, we was required to reach out to someone I didn’t know, preferably involved in a topic I was passionate about. For my project, I reached out to Micheal Behen, the owner of Manville Garden Company. I had to personally observe and interview him as well as a person close to him to get a second opinion. Additionally, I had to do extra research to connect my subject to a larger issue that showcased their significance in the community and/or beyond. The main outcome for English was a article. For Digital Media, a magazine with proper design and layout. For Animation, an animated film.
Interviewing
Originally for my project, I had contacted one of the caretakers of the Arizona Garden at Stanford University. Unfortunately, she was busy, but thankfully she referred me to someone else, Micheal Behen. He agreed to be my subject and, after doing an observation for a few hours, I got brainstorming on ideas from there.
One of the things we had to do was interview our subject. It was here that I learned about many of the topics I wrote about, as well as develop my angle: the significance of doing what you love and how it is worth in the end, even with the challenges you may face.
While I was nervous at first, I was able to relax as we started talking. When we were ready to start recording I got out my questions and he started speaking. In class, we had done practice interview which I was very thankful for as I was able to stop myself from verbally signaling that I was listening and instead showing it through motions. Overall, I found it a very enjoyable process as it was nice to just listen to someone without feeling to the need to converse back to them all the time. This allowed Micheal more freedom to continue the conversation into topics I had never heard about before.
Additionally, I interviewed Johnathan Smart to get second opinion on Micheal and his story. Here I learned about some of the things he did as a boss as well as how he interacted with his workers.
For writing the article, we studied the book Seeing Silicon Valley which I found very insightful. It made me question how great the area I live in actually is, even though everyone keeps praising it. What I found the most shocking was how polluted the area is. While I am still grateful for the opportunities presented to me here, the book made me question how many people are able to take advantage of the area and how many people get left behind.
Animation
Production as a Whole
This was my first production with scenes longer than 10 seconds. The was I saw this documentary is that I could either do a lot of detailed still frames with small animations on loop, or I could animate simpler things and constantly have some kind of new motion on the screen. The hardest things was animating between topics that were talked about. I made Micheal and other people really simple: one, because I haven’t practiced drawing complex figures and two, because I don’t have enough time to draw anything complex. To showcase differences I decided to use colors. Micheal is always purple and everyone else is yellow. Green was used as an accent color. This is called a split complementary pallet. I chose this pallet because I wanted to show contrast simply but also have enough colors to draw complex garden scenes.
Scene 1.1
I am putting Scene 1.1 first because it is the first scene I animated. It was pretty rough at first because I had never used Adobe Animate for tweening so much before. I discovered that the program could automatically add ease (both in and out) which was a big help in being able to make enough footage.
Introduction
Next, I animated the introduction. I wasn’t originally going to include an introduction, but I realized that my video wouldn’t make sense without one. Since I knew I wouldn’t have a lot of time to animate, I took just the very beginning of his introduction.
Scene 1.2
I don’t enjoy drawing hands, so this was a struggle. I often held my hand out in front of me and took pictures of them while animated the first part of this. For the second part I rigged a character puppet which I used to make the walk cycle as well as the arm movements.
Scene 2.0
By now, time was getting short. Despite working my hardest, the deadline was coming up, so I made a few shortcuts. Even though I wanted to animate and extra scene and had already storyboarded it, I knew I wouldn’t be able to include it. I knew that I had to included this scene though because it talked about a very important topic for Behen about pushing through the paralyzing fear when you think everyone else is better than you.
Credits
I had a lot of fun drawing the credits. I decided to make the background green because that is my favorite color and I wanted to show the difference between Behen’s story and my words. I doodled a little bird, but animated it stretching because I wanted to the credits a little more interesting.
Digital Media
In Digital Media class, we learned to use Adobe InDesign.
Reflection
The Documentary was a big period of growth for me. It was nerve racking reaching out to someone I didn’t know. While the original person I wanted to interview was busy, she directed me to Micheal Behen. I learned a lot about interacting with other people for the first time in a professional manner. It really got me out of my comfort zone. Likewise, the animation took forever most of which was tedious work, but I realized that every ounce of hard work that I put in would show in the end. In the end, seeing it all together was really rewarding. Last of all, the article was the most fun as I really liked drawing all the flowers, but holy cow InDesign made me want to throw my computer sometime. Whether it be crashing or how it took me forever to figure out how to import the colors I wanted, there always seemed to be something about InDesign I didn’t like. Even so, the article was worth it in the end and I am very happy with how it turned out
If I could do this project again I would record audio inside. I recorded the interview outdoors, hence the random birds and planes flying by. Recording the audio inside would have reduced the amount of editing I had to do and improve the quality of it overall. Likewise, I think it would have been nice if Behen read of a script instead of taking clips from the interview. One of the hardest parts of the project was including Behen’s whole story but still making the narrative flow together. As I had to condense a 45 minute interview into 2 min, there was a lot of stuff I had to cut out, but probably could have included if the voiceover was prewritten.
Last of all, I want to thank Micheal Behen for giving me his time and story. I would also like to thank John and Miguel for helping out too and letting me take photos of them.