Documentary

Introduction

For the Junior Documentary Project, we are asked to portray an intriguing person, group, place, idea, or issue by gathering primary and secondary research sources. We practice to develop a distinct perspective about our subject’s significance in the community and/or world. This unit gives us an opportunity to experience narrative-style journalism.

For this unit, I chose English Language Development(ELD) and English learners as my subject. I am an English learner myself. Being an English learner in the U.S. can be really difficult than what many people might think. I hope people can understand the struggles and the emotions English learners have and perhaps help the learners to overcome those struggles.

The Documentary Unit was probably the most tiring project I have done at Freestyle so far. The outbreak of COVID-19 forced all the students to finish their projects at home in the middle of the project. I encountered many challenges during the project such as interviewing people for the first time, writing a whole article, animating on a small tablet, and barely sleeping before the due dates. However, when I look back, I realized how much I learned through the project and how much I have grown as an artist. I can’t believe that I could tackle all the difficulties and turn in the article and the animation before the due date while maintaining their quality. The Documentary Unit was still an interesting unit after all.

For the article, I spent a lot of time on doing research on my subject. I then came up with some questions for my interviewees and wrote an article after the interviews. Click on the image below to see the copy of my article(just texts).

Animation Production

Storyboard for my documentary.

Two images above are the color schemes I chose for my animation.

Documentary Animation
Drawing all the scenes(total of 12) with Photoshop
Putting everything together with After Effects(look at all those layers…)
A magazine article I designed(click to view!)

Photo Gallery

Interviewee Bio

Lisa Gallo

Lisa Gallo is an English/ELD teacher at Mountain View High school. She has lived abroad in Italy for six months in 1991. She has been teaching ELD for 29 years.

Janessa Nga

Janessa Nga is an English learner from Hong Kong. She moved to the U.S. when she was 17 and is now a sophomore college student at Foothill College. She hopes to study global relations when she transfers to a UC.

Christina Chang

Christina Chang is an adult English learner from Taiwan. She moved to the U.S. with her husband and her two kids in 2016. She now works at a bank and is still trying to improve her English everyday.