The Junior Documentary project is focused on encouraging students find an interesting person, place, or idea that relates to a modern issue or topic that has current relevance. Students conducted primary research, getting interviews with the subjects of their projects, as well as secondary research in the form of interviews with people in proximity to the subject and articles or research papers related to the issue the subject’s story represents. In their English classes, students learned the steps to crafting a proper profile article, utilizing narrative-style journalism. In their Digital media classes, students took the articles written in English and used Adobe InDesign and utilized their design and photography skills to create an engaging 6-page magazine article. In their respective elective classes, students combined these elements to create a finished artistic representation of their work for the project. Design students created a full magazine style book for their article, while Film students created 5-10 minute documentary films of their subject. In Animation, we had to create a roughly 90 sec animated video using small clips from our original interview recording.
During the planning process, we were encouraged to pick profile subjects who we felt represented something important, and upon hearing this, I almost immediately knew that I wanted to center my project on my former bosses Tamara and Julie Michel. I worked for the Michel sisters for four months or so at Boutique 4, a clothing and novelty shop in downtown Mountain View that unfortunately closed earlier this year after seventeen years of business. Knowing the sisters personally, I knew I really wanted to create a project that showed my audience, whether they were loyal customers or people who had only gone in once or twice, just how much the sisters worked to contribute to their community, and why that’s important in modern day Silicon Valley.
I personally feel like I struggled a lot with this project, but at the same time, I feel I was also able to gain a lot. I had an extremely rocky start, as I was gone for two weeks in April visiting my family in Turkey, so I had no way to keep working on the animation portion of my project efficiently, which threw off my workflow pretty substantially. I was really behind to the last moment, and I feel I wasn’t able to include all I had originally planned just as an unfortunate result of not having the time. That being said, I got a lot out of this project as well. For one, I feel I was able to get to know my bosses better through this project, which I really appreciated as someone who really looks up to them as role models. I think during this project I also got better at adjusting my expectations, and allowing myself to be satisfied with work that isn’t as ambitious as I originally planned.
For my article, I wanted to center my angle around the creativity and life that was found in Boutique 4 that’s rare to find in other shops of its kind, especially here in Silicon Valley. Most of my personal draft revisions were in the drafting, as my most insecure point in writing is structure, so I wanted to make sure I had a solid base to craft the rest of my article around. After that was planned out, I was pretty much just able to flesh out what I had planned in my head using creative profile writing language and strategies we learned in class. I’m honestly really proud of how it turned out, and I really don’t think I would change anything even if I had more time.
I didn’t have a huge plan going into the design of my actual article other than making it look nice. Design is admittedly not my strong suit, so I mostly just went with a simple colorful pattern that represented the overall vibe of my article. I tried to space the text out with pictures so as to not overwhelm the reader with huge chunks of text. Overall, even though it’s simple, I’m really happy with how it came out!
For my animated film, I was really focused on making something I could be proud of. I knew that I struggled with time management, so going into my film, I knew that was something I wanted to improve on, (whether or not I actually succeeded in that is a bit iffy). My first move was to draw out reference pictures of my subjects for the video, loosely based off of their outfits when I met up with them for their interview.
My main method going forward was to create most of my longest clips earlier on into the process, first sketching them out, and later coming back and outlining and coloring them. Overall, the creation of this process was extremely hard, and I wish I had more time to perfect the details I wanted, but I feel really proud of what I created and my interviewees were happy with it, and that was what I set out to do, so I feel very happy about the final result!
Tamara and Julie Michel are two extremely hard working sisters and business partners. For years, they worked to give back to the Mountain View community though creating a positive environment in their shop, Boutique 4. Even as the store closes after seventeen years of business, the impact of the store and the sisters on the community and their loyal customers cannot be overstated.