Let's Do This One Last Time: Back with A Level - Pt.1

     Hey everyone I'm back! I remember saying something about maybe doing this regularly outside of school all the way back in my very first post and this is probably just wishful thinking or something but I kind of now want to do that again going into college and beyond. So lets see if I end up sticking to that. That doesn't really matter right now though because this post is primarily about one of two projects I'm going to be talking about that I did in my A level AICE Media Studies class. This post is going to talk about the Documentary Project I did so lets just start before I ramble for too long about stuff that doesn't relate to this.

    My documentary project titled, "Con-crastination," was something I did in a group a three, comprising of Mel, Larissa and I. Our goals for this project were to inform people about procrastination and hopefully give them more insight into a topic that most people just brushed off as a normality in life. We wanted people to see this and more or less go away with either new information or at least a thought of learning more about procrastination in general. From that goal we then obviously had to figure out how we were actually going to, you know, DO IT.

    Cue the planning part of the project. This is where we spent a few hours -(minus the lost period where we couldn't decide on a topic)- trying to see the best way to go about making the documentary itself. I actually do have a very crude and, in hindsight, very naïve schedule made early on. 

Even thought the timeline is off this is actually how we ended up splitting the work for the documentary trying to work to everyone's strengths. I did the editing because I was already familiar with Premiere Pro and After Effects. Mel and Larissa did the filming for the interviews because they had found friends very quickly and knew how to direct them when they asked the questions. I myself actually need to working on directing people because I usually can't express my thoughts correctly so they kind of saved me in the interviews not gonna lie. I did do one interview but I didn't really say anything because the interviewee I feel did a good job already, just adding that because I know my voice is heard in the documentary at some point for an interview. Anyway, the picture above as I said before is how we split it up. Then after all that comes the actual creation process, production and post-production.

    Here is where everything went down the drain. I'm exaggerating obviously but I do feel that, ironically, my procrastination hurt the final project. The production itself was perfectly fine, we got the interviews we needed and they were pretty good. The answers for the most part were satisfactory, we had even gotten an extra interview we didn't use just to have more options. Here is actually an example of one the shots we had as b-roll which ended up in the documentary.

Then when it came to the editing it actually started off good. I was on schedule and was trying to get through all of the footage. What ended up getting to me was all the minute details I started putting in. Once I got past all the basic footage I had to start adding things like text and graphics which is what caused me to slow down and start to waste some time. This was probably expected because it has happened a few times before but my take away from this is to simply give myself more time to edit or to get done with a huge chunk very early on. Essentially I just have to make sure the workload is spread more evenly. Also, for anyone who is curious here is the link to the finalized documentary. :)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IRu6bZGiRS8Qbvf23nVS9sdxzA4h5BMR/view?usp=sharing