Documentary Project Blog Post #5

I feel a lot better about where my group is at in this project after Wednesday night. Also, that day of class where Neil and Ms. Hodge let us work on our project helped tons too, we came up with a bunch of questions to ask leah's parents, and Maya. We interviewed both of leah's parents separately, and got some good stuff. Maya is sick, so we haven't really been able to interview her or shoot much b roll, but thankfully she is getting better and since we have the camera for the weekend, hopefully we'll get some good stuff for the trailer!

"Theme for English B" by Langston Hughes:

To be honest, I don't really understand poetry all that much, it's never totally made sense to be, but let's take a shot at it. I thought it was interesting how he addressed race in a different way thank others usually do, and shows how much equality there is between all human beings on this earth.

Documentary Project Blog Entry #4

My group has checked out a camera for the weekend so Leah can take it out of town with her to get some good b-roll of her family for our documentary. After we return our camera we want to try and check it out next week so we can start interviewing her family, even if we can't get the camera, we're lucky that we don't really have to schedule many interviews since we have access to Leah's family almost all of the time.

Documentary Project Blog Entry #1

Right now my group has figured out that we're going to center out Documentary kind of around Leah's family. We're currently thinking of possible questions to ask leah's parents and sister, and even Leah. We're planning on asking them why they wanted to adopt, how they ended up adopting Maya, and to describe the process. We are also going to to talk with some people who work with leah's mom at an adoption agency.

I've never really thought about when people say "it's a documentary" or "it's like a documentary." It's interesting how much of a difference there is.

Documentary Project Blog Entry #1

Part 1:
As of right now, all my group has is a general idea of what our documentary is going to be about. We want to do it on the topic of adoption. Possibly talk to someone who has been adopted, people who have adopted, and maybe someone who has given their child up for adoption. I think we will need some help finding and narrowing down our focus. So far my group has worked together well in coming up with our idea.

Part 2:
One of my questions I had before reading the article was, what exactly is the definition of a documentary? The article began with "put two documentaries together and they will probably argue about what is, or isn't, a documentary." So I knew right away after reading that that there isn't really an answer to my question. Something I read that I thought was interesting was when the article was talking about a documentary being like a story, with an interesting plot and characters. I've never really thought of documentaries like that before, and I will take that into consideration when I am making my documentary.

PSA Project Blog Entry #7

Evaluate the PSA project unit—what did you learn? What helped you to learn? What was the most challenging aspect of the unit? How could the unit be improved?

I learned many things by doing this PSA project. I learned many valuable camera and editing skills that I will hopefully be able to use later on in life. I also learned how to better work with others.

The editing sessions at MTN definitely helped me learn camera and editing skills, and having someone there to help us with our ideas when we were editing was definitely also a huge help.

Making a PSA project and having so many different ideas and opinions to sort through and consider was definitely the most challenging part. Luckily, we didn't have very many disagreements throughout the process, but the few we did have were pretty big.

There really isn't much room for improvement for this project, I think. We had enough time to complete the project, and enough resources to get it done. Neil and Ms. Hodge were both very flexible with us missing class to go film/edit, and I really don't have any complaints when it came to completing this project.

PSA Project Blog Entry #6

Overall, do you think your PSA is effective? Why or why not?

I do think that our PSA is effective. I believe that texting and driving is a huge issue not only among teens, but everyone. I feel like people don't take texting and driving as seriously as they should, so in our PSA, we compare it to things that you would never do like have your dog drive your car, drive blindfolded, or read while you're driving. By comparing texting and driving to these things, we are showing how ridiculous and truly dangerous texting and driving is, which was our goal in making this PSA.

PSA Project Blog Entry #5

Are you content with the draft of your group's PSA? Why or why not?

Well, we haven't edited our PSA yet, but we have filmed most of the shots for it. Although we haven't filmed all of our PSA, and we aren't gonna have the first PSA in our draft (because we didn't have enough time to film it before the camera was due back), I am pretty content in the filming process. We have a lot of short shots in our PSA, so for how many shots we have, I think that we did a good job of getting most of them done before the final draft is due. I would have liked to have all of the filming done, but not all of us were able to get together all the time do to jobs, college apps, etc. We've scheduled our editing time for Sunday 4-8, so I definitely think that'll be enough time for us to edit our draft.