Purpose |
For the third project of our semester, the thinking skill we were tasked to explore was reasoning. I partnered up with my friend Dan for this project. We wanted to learn more about something that was personal to us. So, we decided look into what makes our city unique. Specifically, we wanted to show that our city has things to do because usually when people go off to college they are excited to leave York because there isn't enough stuff to do. We set out to make a documentary to show that our city is a fun place to be.
Process
To begin with, we had to learn how to make a documentary and how we were going to interview the people we met with. This process took a while but we ended up with a solid foundation of knowledge to rely upon. We let this research drive the next steps of our project. We decided to let our interviews drive the rest of our documentary. So we conducted two interviews with prominent officials from the city.
In-between and after these interviews we also got b-roll footage around the city. We walked around and took videos of important places in our city. These pieces of the documentary didn't really fit together without a script to guide them. So, after all of the interviews we wrote a script to tie the b-roll and both interviews together. We recorded the script and edited everything together to end up with out product.
In-between and after these interviews we also got b-roll footage around the city. We walked around and took videos of important places in our city. These pieces of the documentary didn't really fit together without a script to guide them. So, after all of the interviews we wrote a script to tie the b-roll and both interviews together. We recorded the script and edited everything together to end up with out product.
Product
Our product was the documentary we created. The english portion was mainly the script and production. We had to think about what feelings we wanted to come across in the documentary. So, we chose to kind of tell our story in making it. This added a personal touch and made it feel a little like a journey. The social studies elements came in when we researched the city and found out about how it grew into what it is today. The interviews also fell into this subject because these interviews had a lot to do with the process of our research as well.
Reflection
This project had a lot of moving pieces that we didn't take into account when we started planning the entire thing out. First of all we didn't incorporate much of our own reasoning into the project. Rather we mostly included the reasoning of the people we interviewed. This problem originated from the preliminary planning of the documentary. We let the interviews be our primary sources and we conducted them very late into the project process. If we had written the script before we had our interviews then we would have had our own ideas become more prominent in the final product. Because we didn't do that, we saw York as this place only seen through the lens of the two people we interviewed. This perspective of the city is great but it dominated the entire documentary because they were our only sources and we used them to form the general opinion of York in our project. If we were to do this project again, I would have the script have most of the focus of the product as a tool to show our reasoning behind our ideas. Only after the entire script was completed and we had our ideas firmly in place would we begin to conduct interviews to back up our reasoning.