Critical Reflection

     My partner and I's documentary "The Stressful Application" focuses on the difficult college application process through two high schools senior's point of view.

    We began our process by viewing documentaries in class as discussed in this blog post. We viewed documentaries such as American Promise and Exit Through the Gift Shop. Through these documentaries we were able to see the usual conventions utilized in documentaries, such as indirect and direct interviews. We also were able to view how and when b-roll was necessary and how it could help a documentary be engaging. Through these documentaries we realized how to properly structure our documentaries, which made our process go by a lot smoother. 

    

    As far as genre, we went for a more informational route, we wanted our audience to be enlightened about the application process. This was due to our purpose, which was to help upcoming seniors have a look into the process and to have seniors who are going through the process now feel less alone. We wanted to have specific statistic to include within our documentary so we could fully comprehend the process, therefore we began to research. These were the articles we utilized for our research:

 

Article number 1

Article number 2

    As discussed in this blog post the first article allowed us to realize how many mental health issues come along with the stressful process of college applications. Though we already understood how stressful this process is since we are seniors, this article further reinforced just how terrible this process was. We learned the reason college applications affect teenagers mental health was that we simply do not have enough time for ourselves since we not only have these applications but we also have school work. The other article allowed us to comprehend just how many seniors are worried about this process. It also discussed how much little mistakes could completely make or break your college application, hence why so many seniors are so worried about their application being "perfect". This research lead us to discuss the juggling school work seniors have within our documentary and how stressful it was on them, however, in the documentary we realized we spoke too much about our experience rather then the general experience, which we didn't realize when originally making it. 

    Our target audience was individuals ages 15-18, all gender expressions, and those who were going through the college process. Originally, we wanted this documentary to be about how all seniors felt about the college process, but after some class feedback, we realized we made this documentary far to personal when speaking about our experience. Since we were both the makers of the documentary, the documentary might have came off as biased which was a problem. To fix this, we could have interviewed another subject, like a college councilor or another student. Interviewing ourselves made have made our actual overall purpose be less clear to audiences.

Here's us (the creators and interviewees) during our interviews

    A lot of class critiques also mentioned the lack of music used in our documentary. During our b-roll we typically did voice over speaking about what we had found through our research or we made it silent because we thought it would work as a transition from one topic we were addressing to the other, however, according to class critiques without music incorporated it felt a bit awkward. Though most of our feedback was good for the footage we used for out b-roll, people did discuss a certain seen that felt jarring to them. The scene consisted of different flyers being thrown. Here's a photo of what it looked like:

    Due to these mistakes, our audience did not always engage with our documentary in the way we wanted. We should have included more interviews with various perspectives, had stronger audio choices, and fix up our b-roll a bit in order for this documentary to be stronger and more engaging. When making this documentary we hadn't realized just how much mistakes we had made, but now knowing these small but important things we could fix, our next documentary could be much stronger. 

    We wanted to represent all students and the immense stress they have to go through, at first, we thought we were helping to represent all of seniors even though we were talking about our experience. But after reflecting, we've realized that when talking about our experiences, we we're far too specific and spoke about it from our perspectives.

     Originally, we were going to interview people who were applying for very specific majors, like musical theatre and those applying for film programs, but we thought our documentary would be too messy that way. However, we should have stuck to that plan so our documentary would have been more broad and not just about us. We didn't realize how much of our bias was included within our documentary which made the piece not so generalizable to other upcoming seniors.

Documentary production part two + editing

 My project partner and I filmed interviews. These interviews were set up in my living room and we had used questions we had previously written. We tried to have the most authentic answers we could, so we didn't practice our responses too much before. We shot our interviews in the same place because we thought it looked better that way, but after some class feedback we realized we should have done it in two different places so it would've looked more interesting.

After filming our b-roll, we had to get started with editing, the outline we made when planning really helped us during this process since we knew how to structure the documentary. I did the editing but my partner helped a lot with creative direction since we were together at the same place so she saw me editing. We knew we wanted to add b-roll that was related to our responses while we were stating our responses, these clips would also allow for context and engage the audience. We added things like rolling credits at the end of our documentary and a intro which I made with Canva. Here is what the intro and rolling credits looked like.

Documentary production

 My project partner and I began production for our documentary by filming some b-roll in school. We looked for college related flyers and also included our schools college and career center. This is some examples of what the footage we got looked like:

We also had to film more b-roll at home, we wanted to use these flyers my parents had gotten for me last year when I was researching colleges. We also filmed some b-roll of us looking at common app and of us scrolling through different college websites.

We thought these different shots of b-roll would be entertaining yet effective when conveying our message. We wanted the documentary to be entertaining and engaging so we tried to add b-roll to make it more fun to watch and help build context when discussing our different topics. The b-roll showed in the various documentaries we viewed in class helped us understand what type of b-roll would help the documentary properly progress and be more exciting.

Documentary research part two + planning

 My project partner and I did research for our documentary. Our topic was the college application process and our documentary is called The Stressful Application. We wanted to look at some articles to get a better understanding on the stress applications put on students.

This was the first article we utilized

In this article the psychological issues that come along with the application are discussed. My partner and I understood that the process was mentally draining on majority of students, but we wanted to do further research in order to understand how many students this really affected. This article allowed us to comprehend the toll applications can have on teenagers mental health.

We also used this article

This article also allowed us understand just how many students were stressed about this rigorous process, even the title was helpful to our understanding of the immense amount of students that are worried about this application. This article spoke about how even making small mistakes in a college application could slim your chances into getting in, hence why it is so stressful to complete these applications. Both of these articles allowed us to further understand just how stressful these college applicants have been going through. The research portion of this project was super interesting to do since I'm currently a high school senior and I recently applied to college. 

As seen above, my partner and I also did some planning. We came up with an outline for the documentary and how we would organize it. Having watched documentaries as mentioned in the previous blog post, we had an understanding of how we should organize the documentary. We also came up with the main question and thesis of the documentary so we understood what was being addressed throughout the piece.

 

We also discussed our purpose, which helped us understand why we were making the documentary in the first place. We wanted for seniors to feel less alone, we wanted to show them that this application is stressful for all of us and that were in it together. We also wanted to give advice to upcoming seniors and give them a look into the process. We brainstormed twenty different shots we could do, it was helpful when filming to have shot ideas, it made the process very smooth. We also came up with some questions to ask during interviews which were connected with what we wanted to discuss. 

Documentary research part one

 In class, after having a lesson about documentaries, we watched some in order to visually understand the formats of them. 

One of the first ones we saw was American Promise, this documentary followed two black boys through their education at a prestigious school in New York. It discussed growing up, racism, and the pressures of school such as parental pressure. This documentary really helped me understand the format used, like the indirect and direct interviews and the way the subjects were place on one side of the screen rather than in the middle. It also made me understand how to incorporate b-roll into my documentary. 

Another documentary we watched that was called Exit Through the Gift Shop, this documentary spoke about famous street artists like Banksy. The documentary was originally being told through the perspective of a man now known as Mr. Brainwash but he did not know how to edit the film, so, Banksy took over the film. This documentary had a lot of hand held shots in the b-roll. which made the documentary feel more realistic, this was something I considered when making my documentary with my project partner. 

We also viewed op-docs, these shorter documentaries were nice to watch since our project was meant to be 5 to 7 minutes, so it helped me understand how a shorter documentary would look. We got to watch the op-docs of our choice from the New York Times. One of the op-docs was named "Roaches Lullaby" it was super interesting and discussed roach problems in New York City. I also watched a op-doc called "Not for Money, Not for Love, Not for Nothing" which told the stories of women who did sex work in Wales, this op-doc was animated, which was very interesting to watch. Both of these op-docs helped further fuel my understanding the ways in which documentaries were formatted. The pieces included amazing examples of b-roll and how to organize a documentary so that it's engaging but it still makes sense.

I'm back!

 Hi, I am now an A level AICE media studies student, yay! I'm very excited to start blogging again.

Yay!

Film Opening

Here's my film opening, Blue Hour, hope you enjoy!

https://youtu.be/ddxkeEc9vCg?si=y3H_fJ-qOmY4-Jnl