Introduction
The documentary project spanned almost the entire semester in english and even lasted for a long time in digital media and my animation class. It was challenging, fun, tedious, exciting, and most other adjectives I could use to describe something I have mixed feelings on. While I am happy with what I made and how I did it, it was not a very enjoyable process creating the media in the first place. I hope that you’re ready as I take you through my documentary on the Mountain View Farmers Market.
English & Digital Media Production
This was a majority of the Documentary process and also the main product of the documentary unit. To begin the process we had to come up with ideas as to what we would do a documentary about. We had to make three ideas of a person, place, or idea/thing that we would be interested in doing a documentary about. While my number one topic I wanted t do a documentary on was the Monterey Bay Aquarium, It ended up not working out and I moved onto my backup of the mountain view farmers market. From there I did a first visit and took a lot of pictures at the farmers market as well a secured my first interview with one of the market organizers, Nico Lewis. After getting this stuff we would begin finding research and articles to include in our documentaries and present what we had to the class.
After my first interview, I had a significant slowing down of my progress on the documentary. While I was still working on the documentary and keeping up with the assignments in class, I began to fall behind as we started writing our actual final documentary text that would be used in our magazine article.
After Finishing my article text, I had to get to work on making the actual magazine article in adobe indesign that would be featured in the freestyle magazine that would have all the other student documentary magazines. I started this process the same way everyone else had to which was by using assets from one of the previous freestyle student’s article to create a practice magazine article. This practice magazine article didnt take too long and was pretty useful for teaching me how to use indesign. After completing the practice article, I went right into making the general layout and background of my magazine article. Once I was done with arranging the magazine, I went onto making the graphic design elements that I would use in the article in adobe illustrator.
Once I had finished these graphic design elements, All I had to do was put them into my indesign article along with the pictures I took from the farmers market and the text of my article. I had to use text wrap on many of the graphic elements and pictures which gave the article more interest in my opinion. All in all, I was pretty satisfied with my final article despite it being quite rushed.
Elective Class Production
Our project in animation class was to animate a section of one of our interview for the documentary, for this I decided to use my interview with Nico Lewis, one of the organizers of the market. I chose to focus of three questions, one that was about the general importance of farmers markets, one was about his experiences with customers at the market, and one was about a specific customer at the market. I felt like these captured the general feeling of his responses in the overall interview.
My process began with brainstorming and a mood board of what I wanted my documentary animation to look like. While my final creation had some deviation from my initial storyboard, it generally followed the same time frame.
My process began with simply animating the movement of most of the shots and then once I had finished I went back and did the backgrounds and color. The first shot and fourth shots ended up really great but caused some of the rest of the animation to be rushed.
Interviewee Bios
First Interviewee: Nico Lewis
Nico has been working at the market for 5 years, starting out as a peach vendor before becoming an assistant at the market, and quickly rising up the ranks to become a manager.
Second Interviewee: Danita Cox
Danita is a member of Nicholas farms at the Mountain View Farmers Market, She has been working at the market for roughly 25 years. She began after the owner, who she knew, needed some help at one of their farmers markets and so called her out of her graveyard shift at the convenience store to begin working at the market
Reflection
This whole documentary unit was probably the most stressful and rushed one of the whole year. Even though it took up the most time in the year, I felt almost constant pressure during the entire length of the project. This pressure and rush that I had while working on the documentary led me to not enjoy this unit as much as I would’ve hoped. This was added onto the fact that I honestly began to lose interest in my documentary topic around halfway through the unit. That made every single moment working on the project feel even worse and more like a tedious slog than it would’ve been normally. But despite all these negative feelings I have towards this unit and the projects I created during it, I still am proud of myself for persevering and creating some work that I can be proud of and look back on fondly. This is especially true with my animated documentary, which I was quite proud of despite it not being exactly the level of quality I had hoped. My overall feelings on this unit are very mixed but after finishing it I think I am able to look back on it in a positive light. I would compare it to seeing a rainbow after a storm ends, while the damage of the storm is still visible, there is definitely something nice at the end of it.