Introduction
My partner and I decided to create a documentary about his dad, Richard, who was one of the first people to participate in the Peace Corps in the early 70s. We decided to portray him and his experiences through a first person account of his upbringing and time in the Peace Corps, including a personal reflection at the end where he shares his biggest lessons learned from the whole experience.
Richard’s story was incredibly interesting and posed quite a challenge to organize into a linear story. Even though this was by far the most challenging project i’ve done at Freestyle so far, it has been my biggest learning experience from a project to date. My partner and I experienced almost every setback possible, laden with scheduling and technical issues. Despite this, we were able to finish and create a film that we were both proud of.
English/Digital Media
The research paper we created for English followed a very similar process to what we did for film, except instead of just using interviews as sources, we also found secondary sources to back up our interviews. I decided to focus more on Richard as a person for my research paper. It briefly details him growing up all the way to present day, and some of the unique experiences he’s had over his lifetime.
We then took the paper we had written and inputted it into Adobe InDesign to create a professional grade magazine article.
Film
We started off our documentary unit in film by creating a mockumentary. A mockumentary is pretty much a documentary, but with a fake story. This exercise was very helpful in polishing up our technical skills. We learned how to position our cameras correctly, use our lav mics, and how to interview someone.
After finishing our mockumentary, it was time to move on to the real deal. We started by brainstorming ideas for what we wanted our documentaries to be about, then pitched them to the class. We then had to find our interviewees and conduct at least four interviews using the skills we learned in class. Milo and I ended up doing around 7 interviews, three of which being with Richard. This process was very challenging as we were still trying to figure out the angle of our story while filming.
Post-production was by far the most tedious part of the whole process. This was the point where we had to find our story in the interviews and put it together in a way that was both entertaining and that made sense. This stage took us about three weeks. We ended up going through and trying several different approaches to our story, even ditching one of our interviews entirely, and ended up going with one about Richard’s experiences in the peace corps.
