Documentary

Introduction

“How do you creatively and truthfully portray a significant person, group, place, idea, or issue in the community?”

Welcome to the Documentary Section!

In the previous Narrative unit, we created stories from fiction and imagination however in our new Documentary section, we learned how to create stories from reality and fact. In my time in the MVHS Oracle and journalism, finding and producing stories from and for the community, this is something that I am familiar with.

I created two documentaries in this project, one for Film and one for English.

English Documentary:

When we started the documentary unit, I was a little stumped. I had the technical skills to create it, thanks to Oracle, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had the whole world to talk about it was very hard to pin it down to one thing to talk about. I originally wanted to do a documentary about the culture of arts here in the silicon valley, but the big festival I wanted to cover was happening too late into the year, I couldn’t. The idea to cover the Volga Germans came from my grandma; she is an avid collector of the history of these people, tracing back our lineage several generations. In fact, my grandma has two pictures of our past family in her room I used to sleep in. Those pictures actually inspired me to do this project.

The Volga germans aren’t talked about much, their history is often not discussed even though they have a fascinating history. I invite you to come read about the history of the Germans from Russia.

English Interviewees:

Dr. Michael Miller and Dr. Brent Mai

Interviewee #1:

Interviewee #2:

The Germans from Russia:

Click to read the full paper

In our Digital Media class, we learned how to use Adobe InDesign to create a visually appealing article based on our English paper. We followed design principles like contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity (C.R.A.P.) to make it look good. We also learned how to add photos to the article by wrapping text around them.

Film

The Silicon Valley Effect

Disha Kumar, Lindsay McKinley, Jessica Lee, Maxwell Van Gelder, Dr. Nellie Meyer, Nathan Bowen

Working on it to be the best it can be

Mountain View High School is right in the middle of the Silicon Valley. I wanted to find out how it affected students in MVHS and what problems has it lead to.

Mockumentary

As an initiation into the world of documentary filmmaking, our assignment required us to produce a mockumentary. In essence, a mockumentary is a fake video that adopts the style of a legitimate documentary to mock its subject matter. During this process, I gained valuable understandings into incorporating b-roll footage, utilizing my Tascam audio recorder alongside an external lavalier microphone, and manually synchronizing audio with video using Premiere Pro.

We were waiting forever to move into the new Freestyle academy building. So I decided to make a comedic Mockumentary on it, as if we would always be waiting.

Reflection

Throughout all my classes we covered a variety of topics and software. In Film we learned increasingly in depth technical ability when shooting interviews, taking our first lessons in sound and light, as well as how to create ethical documentaries. In English we learned about Who Cares? How to do academic writing, as well as how to tell as story, through research and interviews. I was able to do a great amount of research to tell the story of my ancestors, the Volga Germans. In Digital Media, we progressed our skills through InDesign, Illustrator, and After Effects, being able to understand and to use some of Adobe’s most powerful software.

Thank You

With these amazing documentaries that I’ve worked with some amazing people, I wanted to create a section to thank some people.

• Jennifer Fey, for always having my back, supporting, driving me around everywhere
• Ms. Lee, my middle school math teacher
• Dr. Nellie Meyer, for taking time out of her busy schedule to allow some high-schoolers to interview her.
• Nathan Bowen, for giving great insight into how the school system works
• Disha “Ash Ketchum” Kumar, for being the best interviewee and willing to talk a lot about a tough subject
• Lindsey McKinley, for willing to be the first interview
• Dr. Miller and Dr. Mai, for taking time out of their day to allow me to talk to them about our shared history.
• Maxwell Van Gelder, for being an amazing interviewee, and providing insight.
• Mr Taylor, for believing in me and pushing me to be the greatest I can be.
• And to you, thank you for reading this far. Check out my other pages while you’re here!