Study Journal Entry: Project #4 Documentary

For our final project, Professor Melendez assigned us a documentary short film. This assignment was designed to be relatively short, between 8 and 12 minutes. The topic of the project was very fun, it was about little girls who like to dress up as princesses, but also tore it up in the skatepark. Similar to the OTE project, this project came with a lot of media. This project came with stills, audio, b-roll, and interviews. But unlike the OTE project, this project came with no baseline or guidance in terms of the story or narrative, that was all up to us. I started off by downloading all the footage. Unfortunately this process took a few days, because I had to download the folders one by one, and my laptop crashed more than a few times in the process. Once all the footage was downloaded, I started looking through the footage. I listened to all the interviews and it was especially helpful to have the script of the interviews, because some of the girls were very hard to understand.

I also watched through all the b-roll, and looked through the still images as well. I made notes of which sound bites I wanted to use, as well as some of the b-roll footage and the stils. After looking through all the media, I started working on my paper edit. I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted to structure the documentary, and I basically wrote out my original idea onto paper. I really wanted to demonstrate that these girls are truly just literally girls at heart; they love coloring, princesses, and pink tutus, but they also loved to skateboard and held their own amongst all the boys. Between the interviews, b-roll, and stills, I think I demonstrated my narrative through editing.

The way I organized my media bins were really helpful in the editing process. I created bins for all the girls interviews, the parent interviews, and the boys interviews. I also created bins for all the girl’s b-roll and stills. It was really helpful to have notes of which media I wanted to use, and have all my bins organized before I pulled the clips into the timeline. When I got into the editing, I started by pulling all the interview soundbites I wanted into the timeline. This was helpful because the interviews were obviously the bulk of the documentary, so it was easy from there to then incorporate stills, b-roll, and other footage of the girls skateboarding. I actually had a lot of fun getting creative and adding stills and b-roll over the interview audio. This project is where I really got to experiment with overlapping video and audio elements, such as nat sounds of skateboarding over dialogue.

I thought the fine cuts for this project were easier than OTE. It was much easier to do basic audio and color corrections for this project, I think because I had practice with the OTE project. This was the first project where I added titles, ending credits, and lower thirds, and it definitely wasn’t perfect or the most creative because it was my first time, but I think I definitely got the basics down. After making all the fine cuts, I believe I delivered the narrative I had in mind and told the Pink Helmet Posse’s story. I definitely know more about editing and Adobe Premiere than I did coming into this class. What I really think improved was my story telling skills. I now feel confident that I can look at a lot of raw footage, and be able to develop a narrative solely based on the raw footage. Overall, I think this final documentary project really brought together all the editing skills that I learned this past semester and I’m happy with my final project.