Documentary Critical Reflection

Here’s the link to my final documentary:   https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wwqWTKNV4btJFRIvsDvEBAyZ5jR-C6cB/view?usp=drive_link

How did your research inform your product and the way it uses or challenges conventions? 

Our documentary, Winter Guard: The Floor is Our Home, describes the Cypress Bay winter guard team and emphasizes the importance of community and connection through the activity. Since it is an uncommon activity, we did not have many examples about the same topic, so many of the B-roll shots we had to come up with on our own to highlight the equipment. However, we had a lot of inspiration when it came to the interview shots. 

It was really important to us that we did research on the genre of documentaries, since neither me nor Vicky had ever created one before, and it is very easy to mess up the product with small mistakes. We took inspiration from full length documentaries, op-docs, and episodic documentaries to see a variety of approaches and create the best product that we could. 

For our interviews, we wanted to place everyone that we interviewed in a different place to keep it visually interesting. We got this inspiration from the documentary we watched, called “Exit Through the Gift Shop” because although the topic of that documentary was something completely different, that documentary had amazing interview shots. 

 

 When we placed our interviewees in front of the camera, we thought that it would be best to place something relating to the activity behind them to tie even the visuals of the interviews into an aspect of the activity. For example, we placed a flag behind Vivi to represent the equipment and trophies behind Julia to represent the competition aspect. The piece we took inspiration from made us learn that interviews are just as important visually as the B-roll. 

When it came to the B-roll, Vicky and I decided that we wanted the camerawork to have a lot of quick motions with the equipment to represent the intense feeling of the spinner when the equipment is in the air. We wanted the dance-based shots to be slower movement to represent the grounding feeling of dancing. This challenged the typical documentary style of having mainly still shots to capture the topic. It was really important to us that we found a way to highlight the duality of dance and equipment in the guard world because it is a very clear difference, but they work together to create a perfect combination. The way we chose to go about getting that across was through camera movement. 

How did your product engage with audiences? 

The target audience of my production varies from people who participate in winter guard/dance and enjoy seeing content on it, to people who have no idea what it is. The purpose of the documentary was to share what makes winter guard so special and why no matter who you are, you would find something to enjoy, as well as the more specific purpose of highlighting the Cypress Bay Winter Guard. However, the main audience would be high schoolers who are looking for a place to belong and an activity that gives them that and more. 

My production uses a variety of techniques such as the upbeat audio in the beginning to grab attention, the frequent changes in interviews, and the use of B-roll to hold the attention of the audience. We realized that it is much more interesting to see a product that does not feel stagnant, and if frequently changing visually. So, in the visual aspect, the pacing was intentional to progressively get more in depth to keep the audience engaged. 

 I do, however, think that it may have been a better option to put music in the background. Our original idea was to highlight the sound of the flags, since that is what we hear during rehearsal, when the B-roll was taken, however it did feel a bit flat at moments. We did find a lot of music that matched the vibe really well on Bullet Proof Bear, which is a great royalty-free audio website. We ended up using it in the intro, but not in the rest of the piece, which was not a creative decision that I would make again, since the lack of music was a missed opportunity to have that aspect to help develop tone. 

I also believe that it may have been a little hard to see the interviewee’s faces, since the lighting was a bit difficult to work with, and may have also affected the way that the audience perceived the tone. However, the B-roll was intentionally very bright and well lit, so I think it balanced out. 

How does your product represent social groups/issues? 

It was really important to me that out of all the routes we could have gone with this topic, we went with how connection is the root of it all. We considered making it about how much work it is, focusing on one person, a variety of options, but the one thing that makes people stay in groups like this is connection with your team. So, one thing we really wanted to emphasize was that anyone could join, and it was a great way to be social, which is a common issue for many incoming high school students. It is also really relatable, so people will feel connected to the story, even though it is such an uncommon activity. 

The production has a variety of interviews to allow people to connect to at least one of the individuals. For example, I chose to include Yadrien (the boy) in the interviews because I thought it was important to highlight that winter guard is not only for girls, like most people would assume when they find out that it is dance-based. Yadrien is a spectacular member, which is another reason why we gave him a solid chunk of the documentary, to show off his skills and show what people aspire to be like. 

We also thought it was important to make it mainly about the students, since we are high school students ourselves, and we knew how to communicate the way we think in an effective way. However, by including Erick, we added to the idea that once you join Winter Guard, it will have impacted your life for good, possibly even to the point that you want to pursue coaching it as a career. This ads to the varying age in the representation. 

In most situations, it is much better to have a wide variety of ages, genders, etc. Included in the piece, but since our target audience was teenagers, we didn’t necessarily feel the need to interview parents or anyone outside of that age range, since it would throw off the purpose of connection within the team. So, within the team, we included individuals who were young freshman (Vivi) all the way to developed and more mature seniors (Maria). This was also a decision we made instead of only highlighting more experienced members because we wanted to emphasize how any grade can participate, and all work together to be one team despite the age difference. 

Overall, this project taught me a lot about developing a story in the genre of documentary and seeing all the aspects come together to create that story that brings light to some important messages for any High School student. 

Post Production- Documentary

 Hi blog! To wrap up this project, here’s what Vicky and I got done regarding the post-production process. 

This was a PROCESS because I hadn’t ever taken on this big of a project with only one other person before, since last year I had 3 other people to help me. It was really cool to see a new part of every step in the process though, and I learned a lot throughout. 

You may be wondering what the name of this documentary is, and the reason I haven’t mentioned it is because until this point in the process, we didn’t know what to call it. We threw around some ideas like “Rifles and Flags” or “Guard Family” but nothing felt completely right, so we waited til after production, hoping that someone would say something in an interview that we could use. The name we ended up picking was actually just something Vicky and I thought of together though. The name we chose was “Winter Guard: The floor is our home”. We chose this name because it captures the found family tone of our documentary. 

On November 14th, I also created the graphics for the credits as well as the lower thirds that I knew we would eventually need to match the color scheme of the other graphics. I chose royal blue and gold to represent the Cypress Bay school colors and made them simple, since I realized that the background would already look really busy, so the more simplistic design was the better option. Like I mentioned earlier, Vicky and I had already designated the roles, so it was really easy to make the graphics for the credit sequence in the beginning. Also, since I know all of the guard interviewees personally, I knew how to spell their name just fine and had no problems making lower thirds. Here is a photo of my lower thirds and credit graphics: 

On November 15th, I watched all of the footage that we had from the interviews and cut the long video into small clips of each question and forwarded the ones I thought best told the story to Vicky since she was the main editor. I went through a lot of footage, and the entire process took me around 3 hours since we had 5 different interviews and around 20 questions from each of them. The clips that I ended up choosing were mainly the ones about personal experiences and basic understanding of guard so that the audience could not only get to know the activity, but also the people in it, since that was our goal for the documentary. Erick (tech) had an amazing interview, and it was the hardest to narrow down his answers because they all were really enlightening, but I think it would seem very imbalanced if we put more clips of him than anyone else, and we wanted a clear understanding of who every interviewee was. I believe I got about 90% of this process done on this day. Here is a photo of editing the editing process: 

On November 16, I finished cutting the clips for the interviews. I used premiere pro to do this process and Swiss transfer to forward all the clips to Vicky. Both were very easy and straightforward to use, making such a tedious process a bit less inconvenient. I also worked on the title graphic and decided what color scheme to have the whole thing go with. I used the same golf and blue as before, since those are our school colors, and the ones that guard wears and highlights a lot. I am really proud of the title graphic because it fits the theme very well, I believe, and ties into the story quite well. Here is what it looked like: 

THE FINAL DAY! On November 17, the big day, I pretty much wrapped up everything that needed to be done. Finished graphics, credits, and title for the doc, and talked about any problems with Vicky. I also helped find last minute archive footage that we needed for certain parts that we were unable to film to get the full effect. We decided not to put music into the documentary so that the focus would be the natural sound of the flags in the B-roll. However, I did help get the song for the intro sequence that had music. Here is one of the archive photos I sent to Vicky to include as well as the link to the song we used: 

Overall, I was very grateful for such good communication with Vicky for this project and really enjoyed trying something new while still making content about guard, which I care about so much. This project taught me so much, which I will tell you all about in my reflection:)