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.