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,
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