Intro to Documentary

For the Documentary Project, Juniors research and tell a story of individual(s) in their community in oder to answer the question:

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

For the Junior Documentary Unit, we, the students of Freestyle Academy, attempted to portray the story of an intriguing person, group, place, idea, or issue. This unit emphasized narrative-style journalism. We gathered multiple sources of primary and secondary research sources to develop background knowledge about our target. We then established a perspective to approach the project from. We then wrote a research-based paper about their subject’s significance in the community and/or world. The paper from English served as the template for the magazine article (made in Digital Media), animated film (made in Animation), and website.

The documentary I created was centered on mental disorders. Since I personally suffer from some common mental disorders (ADD and other disorders), I wanted to create a documentary that could portray how it is like having a disorder to those who don’t have a disorder. To do this I interviewed four different people which, between the four, had ADD/ADHD, depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. After showing what goes through each of the afflicted individuals’ minds, I would then shift to explaining how to best interact with those with disorders. I unexpectedly, during this interviewing process, came to understand myself better. The interviewing process lets you into someone else’s mind and helps you truly understand the thought process. I really value the experience I got from doing this project.

 

Written Documentary

The documentary paper for English class

For English class we wrote a 5-7 page long paper based on our previously chosen documentary topic. We were given a choice on whether we wanted to write the paper in the format of a magazine article (shorter in length) or as a book with at least three unique chapters (longer in length). I personally chose to write in the magazine article format due to time constraints. Below is my documentary paper, written with the focus of addressing the effects of ADD/ADHD and depression.

Link: Documentary for Website – Google Docs

 

Animated Documentary

Pre-Production + Production

Storyboard Animatic

A basic animatic serving as the guide for the production process

ARVE Error: Mode: lazyload not available (ARVE Pro not active?), switching to normal mode

 

Pitch and Creation Process

Pitch: Below are slides from my presentation on how I  was originally going to lay out my documentary

Creation Process: Some screenshots of how the animation was made (comes after the pitch slides)

(Hover over image to view gallery controls)

I primarily used Adobe Photoshop and After Effects for the creation of my documentary

 

Product

Latest Version

A unfinished version of the documentary – It lacks audio as well as visual refinement in a few scenes.

ARVE Error: Mode: lazyload not available (ARVE Pro not active?), switching to normal mode