Documentary

In my school, we were tasked with creating a documentary. We were asked the question:

How do you creatively and truthfully portray an issue in the community?

We had to figure out a balance between making something interesting, and creating a story, but also making it factual and true.

For the Junior Documentary Project, we were asked to portray an intriguing person, group, place, idea, or issue. We had to gather primary and secondary research sources to create a well-rounded understanding of an idea. We created a research-based paper in English to go alongside our films.  This unit emphasizes narrative-style journalism.

There’s this family that I’ve known for a few years. They are some of the nicest people I know, and they are so giving and accepting of everyone. This family happens to be Mormon. Because of this, sometimes people won’t treat them well. I don’t think it’s fair that people discriminate against them without knowing them. This made me want to do my documentary on them. I wanted to try to create a film with a message about not judging people immediately based on stereotypes, with this family as my subjects. 

This project has been really interesting to me. Going from creating a narrative, and making my own story, to a documentary, where I tell someone else’s story was interesting. It taught me valuable life skills. I had to learn how to ask the right questions and how to be sensitive about issues, while still having to get someone to talk about them.  I had to work a lot on people skills during this project. 

We created documentary articles to go along with our film. We had to write an article that was a mix of researched facts, and stories from our interviews. This is my finished product.

Arabellab-documentary Paper.

In film, we wanted to practice doing talking head interviews, so we made mockumentaries, which are basically fake documentaries.

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Here is the documentary I created with my friend, Sydney:

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