_Nathaniel's_Computer_

 The goal of my documentary Scrapped  was to show what unfinished art projects reveal about their creators, specifically when those creators are young. I think that I succeeded in accomplishing this goal while creating an engaging piece, although there are some areas for improvement.  When it came to research, it was mainly research through other documentaries as opposed to research of the subject. The subject of unfinished art projects didn't have any facts or history I needed to mention, and I wanted the film to be all about the personal opinions and emotions of the subjects. This is why there are no statistics or facts mentioned in the film, which illustrates the emphasis on personal feelings and attachment. Of the documentaries that I viewed in class, Exit Through the Gift Shop was the biggest inspiration, as I took a lot from it's chaotic and raw aesthetic when it came my editing choices and b-roll. Above is a shot from that film, where the unpolished nature of it's ...

  Editing the documentary took two days. Day one, November 13th, was all about making a line edit, which is an edit that just contains the interview without any b-roll. This part was harder than I thought it would be. I had to intercut Jaden and Sawyer's interview together and make it coherent, like it's a continuous speech being given by both voices. I tried my best to alternate between the two subjects, but in some places I had to show two responses by one person back to back, as it just flowed better. This is also where I did the color correction of the interview clips. Jaden's raw footage looked fine, I didn't really need to do much. Sawyer, on the other hand, had some lighting in their house that didn't look the best on camera. The main correction I made to it was giving it a white balance, which made it match more with Jaden's footage and improved it noticeably. Before After  The next day was the day the project was due, meaning I had to add all of the b-r...

   Right before the weekend where I was scheduled to film, I ran into a problem. Two of my four subjects had conflicts and wouldn't be able to participate, meaning I was down to two. Then after that, I learned that of those two, one of them was out of town on a family trip (one they didn't know about until now) and wouldn't be returning until after the weekend, meaning I was now down to one. With the availability of my interviewees out of my control, I set off on Monday, November 11th (a day off from school) to make the best of what I could get. I figured that I would make myself my own second subject, knowing that the structure of the film wouldn't feel the same if there was only one.  That one subject was Jaden, a fellow student filmmaker. Jaden has been my best friend for years and I knew that if there was anyone I could rely on, it was him. I arrived at his place in the afternoon and we set up the interview in his bedroom. He had a shelf containing his desktop and a...

  From the beginning I wanted my documentary to stand out. When it came time to pick a subject, I realized that given the time frame of two weeks, I had to pick interviewees who were people I already knew and lived close by. I wanted to be efficient, I didn't want to waste time and energy making phone calls to people I've never met who may or may not be willing to be filmed or available when I needed them to be. My best bet was to center it around people from my summer theater program, as they're basically my inner circle who I feature in a lot of my projects, and they all have something interesting to talk about. Working backwards from there, I now needed to decide what these people would be interviewed about.    One of my first ideas was to make it about fans of obscure and independent music, which could've been interesting, but I knew there was something else I could think of that was more... I guess the one word I can think of is special. I thought about the demogra...

 The first big production project we had this year to create a documentary. Obviously, to do that we had to watch some documentaries to learn what one should look like. One of the big take-aways was that documentaries can come in various forms, and while there are conventions of the genre, there are no written rules as to how it should look or feel. Take the first feature documentary we viewed in class, American Promise from 2013. This film showcases the lives of two black boys living in New York City and attending the prestigious Dalton Prep School. It highlights the stress put on students in high pressure school environments and the experience of growing up black in New York. A very interesting aspect of this film is how it is filmed by the parents of one of the boys, and thus the entire thing can be seen as a really long home movie. Describing it like that may be an exaggeration, but there is something very raw about the handheld footage from average cameras that makes the movi...

 I'M BACK! Yes, you heard that right, I have returned to this blog, this time to document my journey through AICE Media Studies A Level. This time the blog is gonna be bigger, it's gonna be better, and it's gonna show all the amazing things I'll do in this high level course. Get ready and strap in, because from this point on it's full speed ahead with no turning back.