Introduction
For our Documentary unit, we were posed the question “How do you creatively and truthfully portray a significant person, group, place, idea, or issue in the community?”
For my subject, I chose the non-profit Climate Resilient Communities. They are a small local non-profit trying to facilitate and encourage conversation between unrepresented groups and the government. Our Documentary started in English class, where we learned how to write good documentaries and create good interview questions. After that, we had to go out and interview our subjects. Some people, including me had trouble finding dates and times for our interviews, but I persevered and got them.
While we were collecting interviews, we were also finding a larger research topic to work on. I decided I wanted to research achievable things that a homeowner or renter could do to make life better for themselves, and me more eco friendly. I felt like i did not know much about this topic, and it would be something that others would also not know.
Animation
For animation, I chose my second interview to animate. we were tasked of creating a 2-4 minute animation that showcased our interview. This was a challenge for me, because even before I decided what to animate, I had to figure out what to animate to. This was because my interviews were over 20 minutes long, and cutting it down would be no easy task. I managed to cut it down to a manageable amount, but now i had a significantly less amount of time to work on my project. I started by choosing a color pallet, which i did with the website coolers.co. This is a cool website that randomly creates color pallets off of a few colors that you have chosen. Now that I had my colors, I could start animating. I animated in photoshop, stitching all the different clips together in premier pro.
Interviewees
The two people that i interviewed is Lesley Lopez, and Caroline Beckman. Then both work for the non-profit Climate resilient communities, and I had the pleasure of working with them in an internship the summer after my sophomore year.
Caroline Beckman
Caroline Beckman is the Resilient Homes Program Manager for CRC and the person who I worked with during my internship. She has an in-depth knowledge of how things work behind the scenes and allowed me to learn more about how people are helping and the problems affecting the community
Lesley Lopez
Lesly Lopez is the community outreach coordinator for CRC and has a close connection with her community. Her insights allowed me to get a deeper look into the people being affected by climate change.
Article
Click on the image below to check out my article! I promise you will learn something.
Creating this article was a challenge for me. We had very strict guidelines on the number of pages, and what’s included. When creating our research paper, we did not have a length limitation, so I think the biggest challenge of creating my article was not designing it, but shrinking and shortening my text so it would fit!
Because my article is nature/environment themed, I chose greens as my color pallet, and included ‘organic shapes’ to make it look more interesting. After I found a font, I was good to go!
Reflection
Creating all this work was not an easy task. I have spent many long nights working on this, and many more stressing about this. When I was done, I was proud of what I had created. I worked hard to find times for interviews, Collected photos, or figured who to ask for them if I could not take one, and animated the important parts. There were times were I had no idea how to write my paper, but if this project could be summed up in one word, it would be perseverance.