In my video I hoped to explore the aspect of Sheila’s book where she discussed being able to inform and also attract the audience. While I find sound design interesting and in the process of learning how to become a designer, I was tasked with being able to appeal to the audience (class) as a whole and trying to capture the parts of his teaching that would keep the audience entertained.

Beware of the Delaware

Budget cuts of the Environmental Protection Agency may be hitting closer to home for the residents of the Lehigh valley than they know.

In today’s political climate, controversies and arguments are not uncommon. Since the beginning weeks of our Presidents reign, the Environmental Protection Agency has been an agency that is on the chopping block fiscally. The current Administration claims that they wish to cut EPA spending by 30 percent (2.6 billion dollars). While these cuts would no doubt affect people across the United States, but it may hit closer to home than you think.

The Delaware River Basin has long been the center of a water restoration initiative. In the 1950s the Delaware river was one of the most polluted stretches of river but it is now clean enough to fish and swim in. Support by the EPA has made this possible by supporting cleaning efforts, holding polluters accountable and restoring the waterways. With the proposed cuts there is no doubt that local efforts to continue the restoration of the Delaware River Basin would be affected. I believe creating a documentary about the local effect these budget cuts would have and the potential risk for the Delaware River would bring awareness and new perspective to the people of the Lehigh Valley

Monday’s class was a true introduction to documentary storymaking. It was a haphazard, unfortunate obstacle of events in which we were thrown into a situation and just had to roll with the punches.

My group experienced many technical difficulties. First, our camera battery died, and then our replacement battery was also dead. Unfortunately, we didn’t find out any of this until after we had decided to go outside to shoot our film. After we finally got a replacement camera that was fully charged, the sun had gone down and we had to relocate to inside a classroom. We lost a lot of time during that dilemma, and then struggled to turn on the microphones, which lost us more time. One of the students helped us with setting up the camera and tripod, and from there we were able to get some footage to compile our short doc.

When it came to editing the footage, we faced a lot of problems because no one really knew how to navigate PremierePro. We all took turns editing clips–cutting, adding transitions–so that we all could get a feel for the program. It was especially difficult because this is also the staff’s first year using Premiere, so they are also getting to know the program just like us.

I think the hardest part about last week’s class was time management. The thing about filmmaking is that you have to be able to adjust to any obstacles in a proactive way. Given more time, I think we could have come up with a more creative and fun short doc, but since we were pressed for time, we just wanted to compile the individual clips into one short story.

Monday was my first time actually attending documentary story making. I of course had an idea of what the class would be like but didn’t imagine that I would be creating a documentary on the first day of class (for me at least). When I first heard the assignment it made me nervous. I don’t have a background in FAMS but I was comforted by having several other talented people in my group with all ranges of talents.

The nervousness quickly turned to excitement as I would part of creating a documentary for the very first time. Rather than feeling intimidated by the project I felt inspired and ready to share my ideas and visions for the project. I was surprised how quickly our group was able to come together and form a coherent idea for a film in such a short amount of time. Once we had set our base ideas, our project slowly came into focus and with our combined efforts and opinions, I was fairly proud of our final project. Being a biology major, I was unsure how helpful I would be in the creation process, but I found that having open, honest and cooperative team mates made this assignment much easier than it could’ve been.

In the end, I was proud of our documentary, how it was a different take on the theme “pets”. What amazed me at the end of class was how diverse and creative the other projects came to be. Even though several groups took on the idea of pets, the diversity between groups was enormous. Everyone had different themes, perspectives and editing techniques that made each documentary interesting and unique.

Shots, story and showing not telling

I did my instagram video based on the pages 27/29 of the book when the author talks about how a good story is well told with the 3 categories of: Who the story is about; What the protagonist wants and the difficulty and tangibility of what the person wants. My video is about a friend (who the story is about) who is studying for the LSAT because she wants a good score and to get into a good Law School (what the protagonists wants) as well as showing how she googles the top Law schools in the United States because those schools are very competitive (difficulty but tangible).

IMG_0797.MOV

IMG_2499.mp4

This is my Instagram video, focusing on the segment in Documentary Storytelling talking about shots. A shot is a single take on an image, that may have camera movement or may be static. With my Instagram video, I try to emphasize on having many different shots and angles to get my point across with the soda.

Point of view