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:
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.
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