introduction

For the Junior Documentary Project, we were told to gather primary (interview) and secondary sources and write about a subject that interests us. The goal was to explore this subjects significance in our (or another) community, and/or the world. We created a research-based paper in English, which we transformed into a magazine article in Digital Media. In Animation, we created an animated documentary based off of our interviews.

written documentary

I chose to create my documentary about the issues (specifically in the US, although a lot of it applies to other countries with similar systems) with mass education in relation to neurodivergent students. I am neurodivergent, and most of my family and friends are too. Many of us have struggled a lot with aspects of the education system, and so it’s a very important topic to me that I’m passionate about and wanted to explore further.

my interviewees

animation

As soon as we got our interviews, we began putting together our animated documentary! The first step for me was to cut down the audio recording of my interview. Once I cut down the audio to a few minutes, I began planning out what to animate using storyboards. I ended up changing a lot in the final animation, but here is what those looked like:

After storyboarding, I found some short animated films and other artwork that had a style I wanted to emulate. I really loved the simplicity and clarity of these styles, and while I definitely didn’t emulate any one of them, I did take some inspiration from pretty much all of them.

I then drew and animated everything in Procreate on my iPad, and compiled it in After Effects to match it to the audio. Here is the final result!

digital media

In Digital Media, we created a magazine article out of our documentary paper. This required us to learn how to use In Design, and more visually represent what we had written using photographs and graphic design.

reflection

Overall, this project has been an amazing experience. I learned so much, especially in English. Interviewing people is something that has always terrified me, but I was able to overcome that social anxiety and I think now that I’ve done it, I could do it again! I also learned a lot about my documentary subject throughout the research and writing process, and got a lot better at organizing and writing bigger projects like this one. I think I grew a lot personally and as a writer through this project!

In Digital Media, I learned how to use In Design, which was very new software to me. I had some trouble learning how the text wrapping and similar things worked, but I enjoyed the process and definitely gained a lot of new skills from it!

In Animation, I think I definitely improved at drawing more quickly. Up until this class, and even this project, drawing people quickly was impossible for me since I usually have a more realistic style. Learning to stylize anatomy has been hard and I definitely have a lot to learn, but I’m proud of how much I’ve improved at it through this! I also definitely learned that I need to shoot for less animation time. I had trouble cutting down my audio, and so I had to sacrifice some quality so I could animate the whole thing. Still, I’m very proud of how it turned out!

thank you

I want to say thank you so much to Freestyle and all my teachers! Mr. Greco was especially helpful throughout the writing process, he was very supportive and helped me figure things out when I got stuck with my topic at the beginning. Mr. Cho was also very supportive, especially when I was sick and falling behind. He was understanding and I am very grateful for that! And Mr. Flo has helped throughout the process of learning In Design, always happy to answer questions! He was also understanding when I needed to spend some extra time finishing up my Animation project instead of focusing on Digital Media, which I am extremely grateful for as I was able to get it finished before our exhibition. And of course, thank you to my friends and family as well for giving me feedback and support!