Introduction
To kick off 2019, Freestyle challenged its junior students with what could be considered the most challenging unit of the year: Documentary. We were challenged to focus on a specific person, group, place or event in our local area and document them not just in an entertaining way, but in a way that would educate the audience of something. In order to accomplish this, we had to research and gather primary and secondary sources. For the first time, I gathered my own primary sources which came from conducting my own interviews.
I decided to profile my mom, Christine Bauer for my documentary. She was enthusiastic to participate and gave me a lot of inspiration and insight as I brainstormed my ideas. I interviewed her, her dad (my grandpa), and my sister. One might wonder why I only ended up interviewing family members, but I am very content with the outcome and quotes I got for my research-based English paper. My mom was going through breast cancer, and I wanted to depict her journey in a beautiful and positive way. Thank to her, my peers, and the directions from my teachers, I feel completely fulfilled by my documentary’s outcome.
This animation took me the longest out of any of my other productions. In addition to animating every frame, I also wrote and recorded my own guitar background music and edited my mom’s 30-minute interview into nearly 2 minutes of audio. I hope you enjoy the outcome as much as I enjoyed making it.
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Research Paper
A lot of research went into my topic, as a big part of making a documentary is, in fact, the research. I was challenged with this at first– I like to think I know my own mother quite well to the point where I don’t need to carry out extraneous research. I soon realized there was a lot to learn. Writing this paper gave me the opportunity to focus on researching the effects of a positive mind, and why cancer should be talked about more as a journey and less so as a war.
My original paper had no sense of my own voice in it, and it focused too much on my mom’s illness rather than the validity in her outlook. I ended up completely scrapping it and rewriting this paper just in time. This time around, although I know there is much room for improvement, I am far happier with the result.
Bios
Christine Bauer is a mom of three girls, and is currently recovering from breast cancer treatment.
Eugene Bauer is my grandpa and Christine’s dad, he is also a physician and a doctor.
Cara Askren is the youngest daughter of Christine, she is also my sister and is in 10th grade.
Animation
No work of art is exempt from going through trial and error. I ended up falling terribly behind in my animation production because I kept changing my mind. First I was going to do stop motion, then I started to realize that wasn’t going to work, and then I had a creative block and couldn’t think of anything to animate. After talking with my mom and getting her input, I came up with this, and am very proud of it.
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16 Photos
We were asked to produce 16 photos that had some relevance to our Documentary projects. Although we found out about this assignment toward the very end of the unit, it is an important assignment because it demonstrates how well-rounded we are as students at Freestyle. Because it is difficult to take 16 good photos based off of a digital animation, I had to get creative with how I was going to go about figuring out what I was going to take photos of. Eventually I came up with the idea that I would ask my mom 16 things that gave her hope. She then sent me this list, and although I wasn’t able to actually gather these photos because I was so burnt out from drawing several hundred frames of animation, I think it shows a creative solution to a prompt that initially stumped me.