Documentary Critical Reflection

In our documentary, we wanted to depict the life of students with part time jobs in order to elaborate on the various factors that account for the behavior and perception of any given student with a part time job.

 The most prominent social issue we wanted to capture with the documentary was, of course, students with part time jobs, we wanted to not only capture their lives but the ways in which they differ from the average student, the added stress and increased workload. It's certainly a piece meant to evoke emotion in people watching it, not necessarily empathy but a general understanding. Generally speaking, I think that that's the most crucial component of any piece of media, that as long as the audience can grasp the original intent to some extent, it succeeded in telling its message. 

Towards that end, I'd have to say that in some respects, we did a good job, but more often than not, it was a failure at evoking real genuine relatability. I think the subjects gave great responses and got very personal in terms of how they really felt—but the production itself perhaps does not reflect this. For instance, the B-Roll footage does not capture the essence of just how busy the subject is, although it's clear the subject leads a life with considerable responsibility, it is not presented in a way that seems relatable. It's more matter-of-factly. Considering that the target audience is teenagers and school faculty members, this is an especially harrowing shortcoming. There are a multitude of students who don't work and we, as a group, really wanted to show the truths of a life with part time jobs to them. For teachers, we wanted to garner more understanding, but on both ends, I think we only exposed portions of how our lives looked instead of the holistic picture.

The branding of the documentary and general aesthetic I felt was good but perhaps not the most expressive of our desired message. I think, at times, it comes off as significantly more sad than it really is; there's no sadness that comes with the increased responsibility from work but there certainly is a lot of chaos and pandemonium. So, internally, yes, the branding and aesthetics and lighting of the documentary meshed, but for what we had intended, it doesn't fit my vision. The title is an example of how we wanted to cater to our target audience, it seemed to me to just capture the essence of a youthful aesthetic, having all of this time to spend to where you could distribute it and aptly call someone "a full-time part-time student". It was a clever name. The usage of direct interviews was a strange choice personally, though my group was quite convinced of it. 

I believe that our research really took form in just our collective experiences, naturally we looked to those around us too, but me and a group member felt as though we were really informed on the topic and had all the right to say what we wanted to say for the documentary. There does seem to be a lack of real research in terms of how perhaps many other students feel but from an immediate perspective, I felt we were decently well-encompassing of how many students feel about part time jobs. We certainly fell back on a number of conventions, like I said before, our usage of music was evocative and helped create an atmospheric mood but it's not a mood that I think fits our particular project.

What was even a bigger mess was the planning which much of it we scrapped and the other which we didn't, we barely adhered to it. Our research of interviews led us in a direction where we wanted to interview not just our subjects but some form of authority that could give us a, perhaps, more objective outlook. But we ended up not even doing an interview with any teacher because we could not come up with appropriate questions nor find the appropriate teacher. Since this piece serves the purpose of creating mutual understanding with teachers, we wanted a mature branding which did at first, encompass an interview with a teacher. It instead took form in the mellow choices taken during post-production as the music presented the subject in a very calm and collected manner. If more care was taken during post-production, I think this branding could have improved even further with more organized, slick, and clean editing choices. 

Some of my biggest personal takeaways from the project was the need to express myself to a greater extent. For me, working in a group is difficult not because my ideas are more grand than others, but because everyone's idea is so equally grand in their own mind that it might not occur to them that others can see the same vision right away. I had wanted to work individually but the topic was interesting to me and I don't believe it's the group's fault at all that the project ended up not as satisfactory but rather a failure on my end to communicate. The onus was on me to film better B-Roll footage, to do more vigilant planning, to structure a better narrative and really reflect my actual interest in the topic. Maybe these things aren't hard to show individually, but they become much more difficult in groups. 

We wanted to represent students with part time jobs and we did, but we showed a very closed perspective of them. I think the actual exposure for them is a good thing, everyone should have access to more viewpoints, but we did not express neither the things we really wanted to express nor the things we felt are true to life. I can't help but be satisfied with it because it was an arduous undertaking and it had a good result, but with the original prospect in mind, it's always difficult to not compare it to what it could have been,

Post Four - Production + Post + Critiques

 Since my footage ended up being of relatively low merit, I ended up accompanying one of the group members in post-production. In all honesty, I have to admit that they did much of the work regarding the splicing of the footage, color editing and lighting, but we both chose music, we both agreed on the narrative structure of the piece itself, and we both edited for music and audio. 

I wanted to talk about the critiques of the piece itself because those were the ones that really affected my reflective process. Many people brought up the editing as a minor mistake and so did our instructor who informed us of an editing mistake somewhere in the middle. This feedback made me consider being more vigilant in the future. 

I found that the majority of the positive feedback was about the actual topic and idea itself, which of course, I understand. It certainly is a relevant issue amongst high school students but in general, it's a subject with a lot of merit. 

I am a bit disappointed that we couldn't produce a documentary that reflected our interest and experiences with the topic as well as we could. I am more disappointed in the fact that my first round of production ended up being useless. But I'll get more into that on the critical reflection.

Post Three - Production

 Way before we even began our documentary production, our teacher sat us down and gave us some pointers and ideas as to how to shoot our piece. The most prominent piece that gnawed at me throughout our actual production was the fact that we needed a greater variety in subjects—towards that end, our instructor thought we should have a male perspective (since the other two subjects were female). So, I would have been fulfilling that role. 

The issue that I ran into when I started filming B-Roll for work, however, was that there were a multitude of times where I just could not. Not in the literal sense, of course, but in the sense that by the time I finished doing something, I realized I had not filmed it, or that sometimes it got so busy that even if I remembered to film it, I could not take the time to take out my phone and record while countless customers stood at the counter staring lasers at me. 

Not to mention the greatest issue of location and framing. Even in scenarios where I could and indeed, did film, I could not find dynamic shots and well-framed shots were certainly few and far-in-between. Thus is the issue with filming oneself and this was also something critiqued about the finished product later with our other subject. Essentially, all of the footage I had filmed at work was serviceable to some extent, but while editing, me and the other group members were not too certain of its viability. Spontaneity and unbridled variety are likely good things when filming B-Roll because you just want a range of options, but we weren't too sure where a story could even rise out of the B-Roll I did film. Thus, we never shot an interview with me. 

I took somewhere around the course of two weeks to gather all of the B-Roll footage so it numbered pretty highly. I think in total, I had some thirty minutes (ok, probably a little under) but much of it was not focused or well-shot at all. My production process was a total bummer and it sucked that I ended up having to fully depend on the work of my partners for the production end of things. I cannot say it was the most fair arrangement ever.

Post Two - Research and Planning

 The research of the project was contingent on the topic, of course. I chose two of the most familiar students in the class to work on. We ended up collectively agreeing on the topic of students with part time jobs, which considering that two of the members of the group (me and another student), was not only a relevant topic but a pretty fruitful one with a lot of potential. 

Therefore, I guess our life experiences count as research somewhat? I mean, we knew how an average student with a part time job lived (or at least, how we and those around us like us live) and even in the process of making the documentary, we would further immerse ourselves in the topic that we have ourselves experienced countless times in our lives. So, I would say a decent part of the planning was just taking what we knew about life as a student with a part time job and conveying a story about that. 

Here are our interview questions:

These were our interview questions for just our subjects. We initially had planned an entirely different set of questions for a teacher but we realized the interview with that teacher altogether might have been something that detracted from the overall focus of the piece. We made the decision together not to even make the effort to get the interview, much less make more planning for it. 

There is more of our pre-production planning log. It was an outline of shots and we considered what B-Roll was most ideal during our planning for this.

A Level Media Studies — Research

It's now next year and I'm in A-Level Media Studies which is nice. Over the course of the last year, I got really into philosophy which is exciting stuff! It seems as though I grow a bit each year, yet, it's hard to see that in the moment. Here's to another great year of learning! 

Let's talk documentaries. This year, one of the big projects that we got in class was the documentary project, but of course, how could anyone make a documentary without first watching documentaries? Or at least, put in the bare minimum effort in researching—which in all instances I could think of involves at least watching a couple of pieces. Luckily, our teacher procured most of the pieces we had to watch, but we were also able to choose a few of our own. I've compiled the list of documentaries we've watched and what I learned/got inspired by!

The American Promise (2013)

The American Promise is a documentary about two young children growing up in a predominantly, white, public, and oh-so prestigious school. I'm sure my teacher does not really want to hear this but when I watch any piece, there is a side of me that appreciates the technical elements of it, but there's also the story-driven side of me that appreciates the end result of the technical elements more so than them in a vacuum. That is to say, I just care more for story and meaning more than I do the things that build up to it. This is just a preface to say that most of what I was influenced by in all of the pieces I will mention were more ideas about how to tell a story and what kind of a story to tell as opposed to technique. 

But for American Promise, the major thing was the usage of interviews, both direct and indirect. For the children, direct was unavoidable, but for the adults, they used indirect. It showed me the personal power of direct interviews, but simultaneously spoke to the more formal-approach that indirect interviews employ. I suppose I prefer indirect interviews in almost all instances. 

The story, however, was a field of great interest to me. This piece is definitely a sophisticated one in that in captures growing up, institutional racism, and race all in one. I can understand the challenge of creating a succinct and meaningful story when given so many themes and messages to disseminate. The American Promise's most prominent influence on me was to inspire me to want to tell a personal story that mixes the inevitable aspects of race and other external factors into the equation. Whether me and my group succeeded is another question...

Exit Through the Gift Shop

I think I speak for a majority of people in my reception of Exit Through the Gift Shop which was that its narrative structure is by far its most entertaining and novel component. I love art, and any documentary that talks about art is already great, but the meta-nature of the documentary, I felt, aimed to transcend the documentary into the artistic realm and that was really cool. 

This documentary left me feeling conflicted, certainly, but also infinitely more convicted in my love for the arts. If it is true that the worth of art is completely arbitrary, then it just means I will and never can have a wrong reason for liking something. As long as the worth of art is internally determined, then I can't say I've ever held a wrong opinion. I really wanted to replicate the humor of this piece which emanates so brightly in practically every scene through Thierry's seeming ignorance and foolishness. 

Opinion-Docs (New York Times)

For an amateur filmmaker like me, these were definitely the most interesting in the sense that I could very much see their creators just like me, sat down, working within a time constraint, trying to best tell their story to the best of their ability. I chose two animated documentaries to work with, but they were both so incredibly raw and uncontained in their storytelling. The sense of genuineness, as though the documentary was both an outlet for the documentarian and a conversation for the audience really stuck with me. Documentaries are invitations to think and moreover, pieces only truly and deeply understood through great contemplation and reflection. 

I've also watched a lot of Michael Moore's documentaries. From those alone, I had always wanted to have some sort of political focus but that ended up not working out so I won't expand on Michael Moore. But I will say, Roger and Me, and Bowling for Columbine are amongst the most flawless examples of deadpan humor emphasizing a real, much less humorous issue.