Editing Process III

I remember clearly, while filming our second interview, he was more fluent in Spanish, and we had asked him what was the best advice he had received. He couldn't really answer in English so when he did in Spanish it came out so beautifully that I really wanted to use it somewhere in the project whether it was just audio or the video. He explained his proverb in Spanish and it sounded so lovely that we all agreed that we could just add subtitles. Also we would think it could be a great way to introduce him as our "first" interviewee. So before even adding his interview we added only the audio of Isabel's grandpa's quote in Spanish. Once I attached it where I wanted it, I began adding text at the bottom of the screen and began translating. We're still playing around with what font to use, be we decided for it to be white since it shows up the most clearly on the footage. Also, I'm still deciding on whether it should be italicized or not. However, there aren't many fonts to choose from.



So for now, we are going to use Helvetica Bold. Also, I did some color correction by increasing the exposure, and changing the temperature of the footage so it wouldn't look too warm or too cold. So, today, we really focused on how the footage was presented.

Editing Process II

      I already had begun editing once we had gathered all of our footage but I did mention some music inspiration. I was looking for music with mainly piano and had a "happy" and "inspirational" sound to it. Thankfully, I did find one on YouTube here. I started to research in the description of the video if there were any conditions, because most of the time you can only really use someone's music if you purchase a license that can be more than $50 sometimes. So my goal was really to find out if I could use the music with more of an academic purpose. Sure enough, I found that anyone could use the audio for personal use. All you need to do is give credit o the artist.
     I downloaded the file and attached to the beginning portion of the documentary and thought that it was a bit too fast for the feel we wanted in our project so then I decided to slow down the audio and to my surprise, it sounded great! As I was editing though, I realized I needed more establishing shots because it seemed as if the introduction was rushed to the interview. For editing software, we decided to go in with our trusty iMovie since it's included in my computer and we are familiar with it.



Also, this upcoming weekend, I'm going to try and focus on that with Isabel and Gaby. Maybe I could even get more footage of Isabel's Grandpa and his every day life from Isabel. Hopefully, this all comes together nicely and so far it is running smoothly, however, we need to start planning the website design and poster design too.

Editing Process

While gathering the footage for our documentary I realized we had enough interviews. However, for the senior interviews there were only male interviewees. So, I thought it was logical to have a female speaking. Yet, Gaby and Isabel didn't know anyone that could be interviewed that was a woman. Luckily, I thought of my friend, who's grandma is visiting for Spring Break. I asked him later if we could interview her and he said that he's sure she'll have no problem with it. So with that out of the way, I started to add clips we took from around the neighborhood to use as establishing shots.
  We also chose to start the documentary with quote said in Spanish by Isabel's grandpa because we thought it would capture the audience's attention since it is most likely going to a be a language they don't understand. But, we are still unsure if we want to keep it or not. We also, put several shots of the trees, streets, and close ups of the first interviewee. We also tried to find some music with no copyright but it's been difficult to find the right one with the right sound. We want something delicate, with mainly a piano as the lead to resemble how delicate and gentle life really is.
   Lastly, this week, we are going to meet up for editing so we can finish the documentary and then get started on our website and poster. The week after break we're going to shoot for our poster.

Interviewee #2 is Done!

      Yesterday, Isa, Gaby and I met up at Isabel's grandfather's house, and it went really well. Although we had to do the interview a little slower because our subject's first language is Spanish, we still got great answers from him. He answered each of our questions, and he was very kind to all of us.
      However, my camera was not cooperating! I had charged the battery for almost five hours. Thankfully, I brought the camera's charger with me, but when I would insert the battery, it would say it had full battery, which usually lasts about four hours if used constantly. But, once we started recording the battery logo on the camera's screen was low and red! Confused, I removed the battery and put it to charge. I thought I'd only have to do this once, but little did I know that it would constantly interrupt our interviewing process! It was such a nuisance and it made me realize that maybe the battery has just gotten old? I mean, I did purchase the camera about eight years ago...
Anyway, once we finished, I made myself the mental reminder of buying another battery on eBay or something.
      We began filming at around 7:00pm, so the sun was just starting to set. We had good lighting for a while, but again, the sun left and we ended up having to turn on some lights in the house to assist our lighting dilemma. Other than that, we had a great time organizing and filming everything we needed, and since Spring Break is about to start, he offered to let us come back if we needed to re-do anything we'd like.
      Lastly, the next morning, I started to sort out the audio we collected from the microphone, and the new footage we had and I started to sort it out onto iMovie, to see how we could start off the documentary. I also started to look for more copyright free music, but still haven't really found one that caught my attention. While I edit thought, I'm going to let Gaby and Isabel know that we should start working on the poster and the website, so that when we come back, we'll be on track!

Reviewing Footage

At first I was a bit skeptical with lighting since I wasn’t expecting our first interviewee to have a dark home. However, while I was listening to the audio we picked up with the microphone, I looked over the footage and the dark lighting didn’t look too bad at all. I actually liked how the shadows bounced off of Joseph’s face because it made him look more serious when we asked him more serious questions. Also, I just increased the exposure and made the footage more cool toned so it wouldn,t look to yellow, and it looked fine. Furthermore, I checked how the audio came out, and it sounded perfect!
   Today, we're going to interview Isabel's grandpa and her sister at around 7:00pm today. So I'll have all of my camera equipment ready before then in order for it to go more smoothly. We plan on asking him the same questions we asked Joseph and Leah in order to keep consistency. Also, I tired to look for clips of the 1940s to add when Joseph was talking about his childhood, but everywhere I looked, there was no copyrighht but a handling fee of $45. So, we might not be able to use older footage.
    For music, I was inspired when I listened to a Spotify playlist called "Peaceful Piano"
." One of the tracks in particular was very sincere and innocent sounding, so I tried looking for a track simialr to that one. Yet, I may even comsider emailing the artist asking for permission to use his or her track for the documentary. From the playlist, I pulled three tracks that each sounded graceful and peaceful. The tracks were Naive Spin by Aaron Lansing, For the Lost Ones by The Daydream Club, and Norresken by Karin Borg.

Film Time!

     I have all my equipment gathered and we finally made it to our first subject's house, Joseph Rotman. We got to interview him because his grand daughter is Isabel's good friend, so she helped us use her grandfather to interview as well. Isabel made it to his house earlier than I did, but right away when I walked in I notice his home was darker than I expected with really nowhere to sit him to get good lighting. I debated on whether we could sit him outside but I liked where he was sitting because you could see some of his photos on a table next to him. Also, by sitting him outside it takes away from the "homey" feel so I decided it's best that we sit him down where he was.
   When I turned on the camera to begin filming it didn't look as dark, thankfully so we continued the interview. As, Isabel was asking of questions, I thought of what type of B-roll I could use while editing that could match his responses. Everything was going well, while I played with different angles and zoom until right before he was done, my camera decided to shut off! It was nightmare, but Gaby and Isa quickly suggested that we use my phone's camera since it had very high quality anyway. The only problem was that I didn't have a tripod for it so I had to hold it as steady as I could. I wasn't too worried about that anyway because I know in the editing software we usually use there's an option to help steady footage. Lastly, we interviewed his grand daughter, Leah just in case, and for some extra footage, and we asked her questions related to her grandfather and she too gave us great answers we can elaborate on.
      All in all, we collected great footage and next week we are going to interview Isabel's grandfather to add onto our excerpt! I also had an idea on someone narrating, I thought I could do it myself o maybe my Mom could do since she has a great voice but we'll have to see what we decide on. For now, we're just going to experiment and see what we like and what we don't like.

Interview Questions

       This weekend we are planning to begin our filming process. So, we began to brainstorm some questions we would like to ask our first interviewee. After thinking of some questions myself, I got a clearer purpose of why we are creating the project since every documentary has a purpose. I realized that I wanted to create a piece in which we challenge the stereotypes of the elderly.



I decided to write down the questions on this sheet of paper until I realized I was asking questions further away from topic, so at the bottom I wrote down questions about my focus which was: How are the elderly perceived? What is the truth to their stereotypes? Also, I made a mini outline on what I wanted the final project to look like in the end, focusing on making the project look like a TV excerpt. As you can see form the image below, I wrote small notes down for the beginning, middle, and "end" to guide us and to keep in mind wile we film tomorrow.

 




     As I mentioned in my last post, I did some brainstorming on what exactly were the labels given to senior citizens. So, I came up with questions like, "Does aging make you more religious?" or "Do you  believe that the elderly are lonely and more depressed than a younger person?" We made sure to also include questions that would introduce our subject with questions such as, "How was your childhood like?" or "What was the world like when you were born? Any events? Politics?" We made sure to include to include personal questions to make our viewers feel more connected with them.
     As for camera equipment, we made sure to rent out our classroom's microphone to clip onto the interviewee, have my camera ready, as well as my tripod. We plan to have everything ready for Saturday and film at around 12:30 - 1:00 in the afternoon. So we're planning on sharing each others questions to make sure our film time goes smoothly.

Organizing Our Thoughts

      Today, we got to sit down with our teacher and clear thing she up. She explained that she enjoyed our topic but then asked us what our overall theme us. Unfortunately, we were still unclear on that. However, she guided us into thinking about how the way the elderly are perceived is changing. She also mentioned how “The 40s are the new 60s,” since people are starting to live longer. Right then and there, all of us started to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
     After she asked some questions to get us to think, I mentioned CNN’s decades series and how each decade has about seven episodes. I asked if we are marketing our project in the same way and she’s confirmed. Now that I compared this project to something I was familiar with, I finally understood that the project we were conducting was a series and that we needed to market our excerpt as if it was part of a TV documentary series.
    We also talked about how we would distribute the series on Netflix. Our series would mainly be about aging and the elderly challenging the stereotypes and myth so that come alongside with aging. According to this article, aging becomes

• Depressing
• Loneliness
• Unproductivity 
• Erases libido
• More religious 
• Less creativity 

  So we thought about creating our interview questions. Of course, we wanted our questions to be about how the elderly are percieved. Also, each episode of the series would contain a different topic of age.  

Citations

• Anderson, Jeff. “Myths and Stereotypes of Aging.” Senior Assisted Living Guides: Find Senior Care A Place for Mom, 14 July 2017, www.aplaceformom.com/blog/14-18-4-aging-myths-dispelled/.

New Storyboard

        On my last post I wrote that I was going to create the story board alone. Yet, I disobeyed myself and still did it on my own! Of course, with documentaries, it's a bit trickier to create a detailed storyboard since it really just depends on what the interviewees say. However, I tried my best to display what I was imagining in my head onto a piece of paper. In each square I described what the viewer would see and hear using proper terminology as well as a short explanation to why I wanted to include the shot the way I described. 

     Also, I realized while I was drawing that it would make sense to include some shots of the city or some shots of the general area. I thought to include this because I put myself in the viewer's position and I realized it would be a bit confusing to start the first shot with a just a house. Even though it gives a sense of location, it would engage the viewer more if they got to see what's beyond the house. So, I added a little note before the first sketch to remind myself to tell my group the next time we met. 

     I found myself having trouble finishing what I'd do next. I thought introducing each subject the same way would make it predictable. Next time we meet, I'll bring the paper and discuss on how we will create the project in a way that it will look like it's an extract from a TV documentary. My goal is to finish the storyboard completely with them and then begin contacting every person needed for the documentary and confirming that they will be able to shoot on the weekend.

     For equipment, we'll be using my Nikon D3100 and a tripod for steady shots. However, I am still unsure if I am allowed to uses any of my teacher's microphones for sound. If not, I'll have to purchase one myself for the group. So, next class, I'll clarify that with her too. 

Major Changes and Storyboard

     Today, my group and I discussed in detail of how we really were going to make this project happen. In fact, we came across quite a few obstacles. First of all, we had talked about going to a local nursing home that Isabel had volunteered at for quite a while, so assuming we'd start our project there, I had already created this story board of some ideas of how our project was going to start.




     As you can see, I had planned out exactly what I envisioned in my head and I was already starting to introduce our first interviewee. However, my group had decided that in the end it would be better to interview some elders we knew. At first, I didn't understand why we wanted to make that change. But then I realized, going to a nursing home doesn't guarantee that the seniors would necessarily want to be interviewed. Also, we miss out on their personal life with things we could film such as their home old photos of them which is vital for our documentary because we are in fact asking them about how their life was like in the past and what some of their greatest life lessons are. So, although my storyboard was interrupted, I can now create something with our new plans. Another thing I noticed was that it was a mistake for me to start drawing out the storyboard without my group. After all, we are working together to make this project and they have a say too in how we want to present our content.
      Moreover, we mentioned using Isabel's grandparents, someone from the nursing home, and Gaby's boyfriend's grandmother. But now that we aren't visiting the nursing home, we need to find someone else that we could interview. Sadly, my grandparents don't live near us, and neither do Gabriela's so we are currently looking for our last interviewee. I was thinking I could ask my sister's friend's grandparents to interview but they only speak Italian. Maybe we can add subtitles if we do use them since I speak the language? But then that might make the project look inconsistent. So, for now, let's stick to English!
     All in all, looks like our storyboard needs to be redone and we need to find our last interviewee for this project. But for now, we are getting back on track.

Planning

     Today in class, Gaby, Isabel and I shared the research we each did individually on our project. All of us agreed that we should start the filming process by the end of next week. Thus, we discussed creating a storyboard of some sort so we could lay out each and every shot of our documentary. By creating this visual guide, we are making sure that we don't leave out any ideas that we wanted to include in our project.
     On another note, Isabel mentioned that we should interview any seniors we know, that way they can be more comfortable for interviews. Of course, Gaby and I agreed and suggested we use our grandparents or our friend's grandparents for the documentary. By gaining more trust and comfort within our interviews, we are able to ask for more personal things like photographs of them when they were younger, or any achievements they earned as b-roll footage while they're answering our questions. We also decided that we waned to keep the interviews indirect so our audience can truly focus on what the interviewee is saying.
       Another thing we talked about was how we needed to base our entire project off of one question or topic, so Gaby suggested we did something where we could take three seniors, all from different backgrounds, and compare their culture, traditions, and customs. By doing this, we could challenge the claim that suggests that adults "are the way they are" because of what they learned as a child.
     All in all, our goal is too pick our topic/question next class and then begin sketching out our full project onto a storyboard along with editing we want to include as well. Moreover, we want to make sure we have all the necessary equipment needed to film before the weekend begins! If anything, I'll have to purchase my own microphone for good sound.

Pace Chart

     Last year, my group and I created a film trailer for the AS level of Media Studies. This time, however, we had the option to create a documentary! Based off of last year's experience, I noticed that my group had trouble pacing ourselves and deciding on a topic/story. So, we created a schedule as suggested by our teacher, to make sure we have extra time to perfect our project.

Pace Chart

  Week 1:      - Brainstorm, research, schedule

(2/26-3/4)

  Week 2:      - Research similar documentaries, make a choice, begin planning film process

(3/5-3/11)

  Week 3:      - Talk about individuals featured in documentary, setting, look for music, start filming

(3/12-3/18) 

  Week 4:     - start and finish editing footage

(3/19-3/25)

  Week 5:     - Start creating poster, find inspiration, research designs, start website for documentary

(3/26-4/1)

  Week 6:     -Finish website, final touches

(4/2-4/8)

Week 7:     -Create CCR, final touches

(4/9-4/14)

     The reason I chose to take my teacher's advice is because last year, my group and I fell behind trying to decide on a story for our film intro. We were stuck and spent too much time trying to find more research to assist our "brainstorming process." So to prevent that obstacle from happening again, I thought Isabel, Gaby, and I could crate a schedule for ourselves that moved faster than it should so it could leave room for final touches, or any last minute changes. 

Research Part 2

       Today I wanted to look more into some similar documentaries that inspired me to focus on the elderly. So, I looked on YouTube, and found this video. In this video I enjoyed the use of still shots along with the voiceover of the interviewee. Also, I noticed that the interviewer was allowed in the seniors homes. This alarmed me because I started to wonder how I could get b-roll shots since I wouldn't have to time to let the seniors get comfortable with Gaby, Isabel, and I. Then again, I got ahead of myself. We have not even properly planned what exactly we are doing for our documentary, so what I think could be a problem may not even develop to be one in the end. 
   Anyway, I enjoyed seeing picture from each individuals past, allowing the viewer to feel closer to each of the featuring seniors. Also, I realized in the description box of the video, it states, "We asked three centenarians what their most valuable life lessons were, and also their regrets." So, now that I was aware of their purpose and topic of their video, I thought of other questions and statements that could help create our documentary into our own creation. I created this list to organize my thoughts.

Main Questions

• Explain how your life adjusted to changing pop culture in each decade you have lived
• What would you tell your 18 year old self?
• What are some regrets that you think about often?
• How important is kindness to you? How have you seen kindness change the world?
• Why shouldn't anyone be afraid of age?
• Are you in love? If he or she answers 'yes': "How have you been in love (for so long)?
• What are you most proud of?

My last question was influenced by watching this video on YouTube on a popular channel called FBE. After watching the elders speak about their childhood, high school, marriage, and their career, I found it even more intriguing to wonder, "What are they most proud of?" Moreover, now that I created these questions to guide my group, hopefully it will get us to decide on this topic. By the end of next week, I would like to start the filming process on whatever we decide so hopefully, we make it work on time!

Research Part 1

       Fortunately, I started to brainstorm early on throughout this course and thought about how under represented the elderly are in media. So, I thought my group and I could create a documentary somewhere around the topic of seniors and their lives through the decades and how it's changed. We are still unsure on what exactly we want to create since so far it is too broad. I discussed with Isabel on how we could bring our idea to life and she mentioned that she goes to a particular nursing home often and that she could ask for permission to visit and interview some seniors. But before I get too ahead of myself, I researched on what makes a solid documentary. According to this article, Stewart Dunlop suggests that a good documentary raises more questions than answers which interested me a lot. Simply because out of all the documentaries I've seen in class and on my own, I am always left wondering what will happen next. 

        To make a documentary strong, it must keep the audience engaged and anticipated. Another thing Dunlop stated was that documentaries tell the truth and the viewer serves as the juror. In other words, as the consumer watches the content, they play the role of deciding on whether the story is ethical. They apply the situation to themselves and think, "What would I do?" So, this is another thing that I decided to keep in mind with what my group ends up creating. 

      I then started to ask myself, "What are the most popular documentaries?" According to Box Office Mojo, the number one documentary is Michael Moore's, Fahrenheit 9/11. This documentary was released on June 23rd, 2004, a couple years after the horrific September 11th attacks in 2001. Yet, after viewing the trailer, it seems as if the piece is almost mocking the public for not having the ability to truly know what goes on in the government. By adding upbeat and action-like music, it kept me interested even though politics don't interest me that much. So, I realized that the trailers soundtrack was what keeps the viewer interested as well as the voice over narration as shown below.

Although I am not creating a trailer, I understand that the director manipulated the documentary but only enough for the presenting aspect. Other than that, it made the viewer feel like they were apart of it. So, that is what I am striving for in this project. Moreover, I found that in this article, it explains key things to keep in mind while capturing a documentary. What stood out to me the most was the last way which was "Enter late, exit early." In other words, ease your way into the climax, and leave the resolution unanswered. 

Citations:

• “Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004).” Box Office Mojo, IMDB, www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=fahrenheit911.htm.

• Dunlop, Stewart. “What Makes a Good Documentary Film?” DocumentaryTube, 5 Jan. 2015, www.documentarytube.com/articles/what-makes-a-good-documentary-film.

• Bernard, Sheila Curran. “4 Ways Documentary Filmmaking Can Capture Real-Life Drama.” 4 Ways Documentary Filmmaking Can Capture Real-Life Drama, Screenwriter's University, www.writersstore.com/documentary-storytelling-the-drama-of-real-life/.