Introduction:
For the Documentary project, we were asked to go out into the world, ask to have an interview with anyone you chose, make a research paper, then an essay about the interviewee, then finally a piece of media on the interview based on what elective we have. Sounds like a lot right? Well let me tell, it was much HARDER than you think it might be. Even though this project was one of the hardest things I have worked on this year, I have learned a lot from it and I feel like knowing how to do something like this in the future will help me in the long run.
Topic:
For my Documentary project, I decided to interview my neighbor Jennifer Baumann. She is a in person and online fitness instructor who helps people keep up a proper exercise routine and keeps them fit. She became a fitness instructor 20 years ago and got into it randomly one day when her ex boyfriend took her to the gym, and immediately fell in love with it. Jennifer’s main goal is to just get keep people up on a regular exercise routine and be motivated to do so.
One valuable skill that I learned from all of this has to be me using my portable recorder. Our portable recorder is a “TASCAM” device that allows you to record audio clearly, I really enjoyed holding the recorder in my hand and bringing it close to my interviewee and back to me in order for it to hear us talking. It made me feel like a news reporter! I also really enjoyed editing the finished animation I made for the Documentary in Adobe After Effects. I learned how to sync up audio from my recorder to my animation and use audio cuts and editing clips to my advantage.
Reflection – I’d say the hardest part of this whole project was definitely making the essay for English class. We had to make an essay base on our Interview and how they are important today. I have never been good at making essays. Back in middle school I got decent grades on essays, I didn’t write almost any through high school since I have had a really weird online learning system for Freshman and Sophomore year. When I joined Freestyle it was the first time I attended actual school, so I had to use my middle school essay writing knowledge to high school level essay writing. Even though that part wasn’t the most fun thing in the world, I enjoyed many other parts of this project and I feel like I have learned a lot.
Interviewees:
English Essay:
This was the hardest part of it all, writing the essay. We are asked to do research about the topic that are interviewee is apart of and reasons why we should care about what they do and why they are important today. I chose to write about Jennifer because I think what she does is really influential and can help lot’s of people. When making the essay we had to combine all of our research, our actual interview, and our start off organizing our paper into a fully flesh essay.
Introvid:
Animation:
Now the fun part! Animating my interview into a documentary video. For this I wanted to create a cartoony but also semi realistic feel to match with my interview. You could tell throughout the video that my art style had definitely improved throughout this project. This was a big step up for me when i first started because I am not the greatest at 2D animation. So you can imagine that this wouldn’t be as good, but fortunately that’s not the case! The first step was choosing which sections I wanted to take from my Interview with Jennifer, so I choose 3 main parts of my interview that I thought was the most informative. The next step was story-boarding what I wanted the animation to see how I wanted it to play out. Finally I started animating. I really enjoyed this part of the project because I discovered an art style of mine that I really like!
Behind the scenes!
Magazine Article:
For this project we had to create a magazine article in Digital Media and copy our Documentary essay into this. We used Adobe InDesign to create this. I thought InDesign would be hard and complicated but it was actually way easier than I thought it would be! One thing I learned while making this is utilizing text wrap, which is basically the given text being pushed away from any images you have. I thought this was fun and I enjoyed learning how to make my own magazine!
Thank you!
Thank you for reading through this webpage! If you made it to the end then I can safely say you were intrigued in my work and wanted to see what I produced this unit. All I can say to that is, you are amazing and I really appreciate you. Have a great rest of your day and I hope you check out some of my other works. Bye bye!