Over the past couple of years, my family has been helping my grandparents transition into living in a retirement community. This was mainly for my grandfather, who is 92, and although he is extremely mentally sound, his mobility has not been great. He’s very aware of this, and has expressed to me many times that he feels like a burden to our family and that he’s frustrated with his body’s deterioration.
This led me to focus my research paper on our society’s view of senior citizens and how it contributes to elder depression. I argued that just as racism and sexism have been ingrained into us, ageism has as well, and we need to take active steps to work against those prejudices. Research has shown that our society has given Americans a skewed view of how drastically aging will affect them. The ageist notion of becoming elderly and inevitably losing our health is not only harmful in the way that we treat older adults but also in the way that we treat ourselves as we age. This kind of mindset prevents people from taking action earlier in life to ease the process and age in a successful way.
The main part of my project is a 5-minute documentary film that I created at my grandparents’ community. My research helped me develop questions that would inspire truthful answers that weren’t too heavy or personal. I asked older people about their thoughts on aging and how they are treated. I hoped to make the film light, capturing their personality and passions as well as their opinions. I got the sense that many of them aren’t asked about these kinds of things often, and they were all extremely enthusiastic to be interviewed. The process made me think a lot about how I want to age and the perspective I should have towards the process as it happens to me. It may seem like a long way off, but aging will happen to all of us.
I worked extensively in After Effects to create the final film. In total, I would estimate that I spent about 9 hours editing. I learned rotoscoping, a creative editing technique that makes text appear to hang in the air in a video. It was an interesting way for me to place subtitles and the names of interviewees in my documentary. This effect is created by sandwiching two copies of a video layer around the text, and creating a mask on whatever passes in front of the text frame-by-frame using Roto Brush tool. It was extremely tedious, but I’m very proud of how the effect turned out. The skills I learned in film and editing will definitely help me with future projects. That was a goal of mine with this project, because I have been a Digital Media student for my time at Freestyle but I have always loved the way films tell a story.
My consumer product for Design was originally going to be a coffee table book, in the photo and interview style of the Humans of New York or Why We March books. As I created the book in InDesign, however, I thought about what I had written in my research paper on the way society demonizes the aging process. “The elderly seem to be the antithesis of every standard modern Americans hold dear: physical fitness, conventional beauty, and independence. Our society is deathly afraid of getting old. It’s all around us: anti-wrinkling products line the shelves of beauty stores, a gossip magazine insults how gray or thin a male celebrity’s hair has gotten. These negative implications, although small, have large effects on our views on aging.” With this in mind, I changed my book to make an imaginary magazine. It features a 101 year old woman on the cover. As a play on Time magazine, I called it “Timeless.” The interviews and bio photos are still featured, but as magazine spreads rather than a documentary book format.
I had many anxieties when choosing what to do for this project. I worried that it wouldn’t be my ultimate project or represent me in the spectacular way that Zenith projects are meant to. I’ve seen the amazing things that past students have done and wanted to live up to the very high expectations. What made me set these feelings aside and choose the project you see today were a couple of very important factors: I loved the documentary unit last year, and have always wanted to expand my film and editing knowledge. But most importantly, I knew my time with my grandfather is limited. He has always been the biggest fan of my Freestyle projects, and said that he wished I would document his living community.
The last part of our project was a presentation of our final product to our fellow seniors, the juniors, and our teachers in early May. Our presentations described the inspiration, process, and some challenges we may have run into over the last 12 weeks of work. Presenting gave me a really fulfilling and full circle feeling. I remember sitting in the juniors’ exact spots, wondering how I would create something amazing like the presentations I had just seen. The reactions from my peers and teachers really validated my project and made me feel that I definitely chose the right subject. Everyone’s projects really showed their personality, and my audience complimented the touches of humor that I had incorporated into the video.
Ultimately, I hope that I’ve created something genuine, if not showstopping. The point of the best documentaries is to touch people and show a side of a subject they may not be aware of. The subject matter of my project came from a very personal place, and I hope that comes through in my work.