Introduction
“How do you creatively and truthfully portray a significant person, group, place, idea, or issue in the community?”
For the Junior Documentary Project, we had to document an certain person, group, place, idea, or issue, while also gathering primary and secondary research sources to help us develop a distinct perspective about our subject’s significance in the community. For English we had to write a research-based paper that would later be used to put in our magazine articles for Digital Media and in our books for Design.
For my Documentary project, I chose to do a profile on my rheumatology doctor. To be more specific I chose to do it about a challenge that rheumatologists face everyday which is burnout/work-life balance. At first I was thinking about documenting the Los Altos Arts non-profit but I wasn’t able to get an interviewee on time so I was talking with my dad about another topic that I could do and he came up with the idea of doing a documentary on my rhuematology doctor.
English Production
In English, the first thing we did was analyze a documentary called “Seeing Sillicon Valley”. Then we started brainstorming topics that we were interested in doing a documentary on. The topics that I was think of doing in the beginning were Los Altos Arts, homelessness, and Mountain View Teen Center. My first choice was the Los Altos Arts non-profit but I couldn’t get ahold of an interviewee so I switched to doing the Mountain View Teen Center but I couldn’t get an interviewee fast enough. So I talked with my dad and he gave me many ideas on what I could do but there was one that was the most interesting to me which was my rhuematology doctor.
When I sent the message to my doctor she sent a message back the next day saying that she would love to be my documentary subject. That made me super happy because I thought I wouldn’t be able to find a topic and interviewee for that topic in time. After finally finding a topic I had to change a lot of stuff in my process doc and skip some stuff in the process in order move on to scheduling my first interview. While I was scheduling my first interview I had to prepare for it by brainstorms a few questions which I would later use to ask my interviewee during the interview.
After doing the first interview we had to do some research and find some outside sources from the internet
Digital Media Production
For Digital Media, we had to create a 6 page magazine article using Adobe InDesign. It was a little easy for me because i’m in Design and before we were assigned to do the magazine we were working on the book which we also had to make in InDesign. So before making the magazine I already had some knowledge on how to use InDesign. We also had some GDEs already done and photos that we already took to put in our books for design.
Before making the real article we had do a practice one first. To make the practice one we used a previous freestyle students article as an example. We used the same color scheme, text, photos, and GDEs that the student had in their magazine article and we used them to try and create our own version of their article. By making a practice magazine article we were able to learn how to
Design Production
In Design, we had to make a book about the documentary subject that we chose. The first thing we did was edit a practice InDesign document so that we could get an idea of how to use InDesign. Then we started setting up the document we would use to
Interviewee Bios
This is Dr. Afshan Najafi. At the time that I did the interview with her she was still working at Stanford as rhuematology fellow. She was born in Tehran and went to medical school there. Then later she moved to the US for family reasons.
This is Dr. Moyer, she is Dr. Najafi’s co-fellow. She she worked with Dr. Najafi for three years.
Reflection
When we were first introduced to this project I was not super excited since this would be my first time interviewing someone and also my first time creating my own book. Some things were fun but some weren’t like when we were trying to find topics that worked for us and where we were able to get an interviewee on time. I also didn’t really like having to write a research paper and also doing the interviews because Im not much of an essay writing person as well as talking in front of people because if you know me then you would know that I’m not a very talkative person around others so it made me a bit nervous. The part that was fun for me was making the GDEs for my book. Overall I am proud that I was able to complete both the book and the magazine on time. Im also proud that I was able to learn some new things from Adobe InDesign so that later on I can use what I learned in some of my future projects.