For this documentary project, my group members and I
created a short film about The Shoe Game. This is a community of people who buy
and sell the latest, most rare shoes, most of which are Jordans and Nikes. This
was always an interesting thing to me as I’ve seen kids at school who wear a
different pair of shoes every day and have collections worth thousands of
dollars. I still find it very interesting although the amount of drama within
our school shoe game was less than I first expected. This however, did not
affect the quality of our film. I don’t think we could go too much further with
our topic but I don’t regret choosing it. I thought having the freedom to
choose our own topic was vital, otherwise I don't think we would have been as
interested and this would have made the final result not as strong.
Throughout
the process of making this film, I discovered that documentary filmmaking is
much different than other forms of film. I found it to be much more difficult
than creating a film where there are actors or just something experimental. In
other types of films, lines can be changed and you are delivering something
from your own imagination and can be creative, while with documentaries you
must stick to the truth and not stretch facts to make the film more
interesting. I also learned about editing a documentary and all the possible
ways to format it. This allowed me to get more creative with how to edit it.
One of the most challenging aspects of the process
was planning how the final result would look. Once you have all of your
footage, information and even script for a voice over, it can be very difficult
to see what the final product will look like. You may have a plan but it will
always change until there is a stable rough cut on the computer. One of the
ways I overcame this was to edit our interviews and parts that I knew would
fit, and then recorded voice-overs. As soon as the voice-overs are added in, it
becomes much easier to put in other b-roll. I under estimated how challenging
this process would be but I found it very rewarding in the end.
If
I were to do this again, I would probably focus less on what the final product
would look like and plan out what information would go into the film first. I
also would not write a script until all of our interviews were done because I
found that what the kids had to say compared to what they did say had a huge
affect on how the film turned out. Besides these few things I think we made a
pretty strong documentary for our first attempt.
I
think that it went generally smoothly for this first year. I thought that it
was good to show us examples of other short documentaries but maybe you could
also give more general ideas of how to structure the film. Also I think there
could have been a bit more individual guidance throughout the process. Instead
of going over some things with the whole class you could have weekly meetings
with each group to go through what they need to work on and what’s going well.
Overall what we needed was simply work time, which you did give us and truly
helped. At first I was slightly stressed and felt rushed but once you gave us a
bunch of full classes to work I was able to overcome some challenges and that’s
what allowed us to finish.
Overall
I think this project went smoothly and we were able to come out with a fairly
solid documentary that I think captures The Shoe Game quite well. The deadline
extensions helped a lot and without them we would have rushed and that would
have affected the final product. I think showing some of our films to next
year’s class would help them greatly. At least from our group’s point of view I
thought this documentary project was a success.
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