THE END HAS COME

THE END HAS FINALLY COME. Not a zombie apocalyse, at least not yet or ever, but this is the end of the project. Hard work and the frustration has paid off in creating a project all on my own. 

This is the Documentary excerpt: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv88DN2DVpA 

This is my CCR:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv88DN2DVpA 

ALMOST THE END

We are almost at the end. This project has been a challenge, yet it has provided me with great joy. I have pushed myself further than I thought possible and I am glad that I decided to create a documentary on a topic that I feel strongly about and a topic that is controversial in the United States. 

Here is the poster: 

Website: https://triggerfight.weebly.com

TRAILER IS DONE!!!

So I thought that there was something missing on the website, which is why I decided to do a trailer. Now I know nothing on how to create a trailer, but I incorporated some new footage as well as some footage and audio that will be seen on the excerpt. Now with the trailer finished, the website is officially done. 

Check out the trailer below 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kU3qcWs--E 

The social media links are all incorporated and working and the background is great. I say this because when I went to check on my website after I published, the background was fall themed, but while editing I did not see that.

The Creative Critical Reflection is almost done and this project is almost done as well and I am super excited of what is to come. 

This was an amazing experience that defintely got me out of my comfort zone. 

Editing Days #3 and #4

I can tell you straight up that I am not the best editor and I comepletly struggled during this process. I have been working for the last two days on editing the documentary and trying to figure out how to organize it. I think I found the organization of the documentary difficult because when I went to do the interviews I would always change questions but I didn't realize that asking the same question might have been a better option in order to develop the story. I also felt that my B-roll was the same thing, just in different locations, mostly looking at the back of a crowd. Though I could see that it creates my perspective and what I see, I felt like it was too repretitive. But we shall see what the audience thinks (my classmates). 

Though I do know that in the end, I tried my best and I am proud of what I have done and the challenge that I put my self through. 

Poster Changes

My poster was technically all finished, but I went back to check if it keeps up with the conventions of a documentary poster and I found some mistakes plus I also did some research on PBS again. 

So starting with the changes, I decreased the font for the production line above the title of the film and I also added a slogan kind of line where it tells you a little bit about  what the documentary will be about. I decided to go with "Our Right.Our Life." which represents the debate with the gun control issue. 

Another element that I changed was Frontline which is a section of PBS that show documentaries. But I then realized that they are narrated and I didn't want someone to narrate the story so I decided to go with PBS POV which shows documentaries through point of views which works perfectly with my documentary. 

WEBSITE and CCR

I have been working on the website yesterday and today and I am almost done with the website, I just have to create my trailer for the opening of the website and change some pictures to make it look nice and link my social media sites that I have chosen which are Facebook and Instagram which reaches my target audience of 15+ students and parents. 

I have also been writing what I am going to say for the CCR and how I am going to organize it. 

Time is ticking but I am excited about how it will turn out. 

Website

I am currently working on the webiste and I am writing down the tabs that I feel are necessary and what I am going to write on each tab. I am creating a rought draft of what I want to say and I will go back and make sure that what I wrote is appropriate and mature.

I will then have to add the video when it is done, which it almost is and I will add some pictures that I took from the marches that I have been thoguhout this documentary process. 

As of right now, there will be the tabs:

- Watch Excerpt 

-Where to Find

- About

- Episodes

- Contact

This is what I have so far. 

POSTER

The poster was a long process, longer than I actually thought. 

It took me a couple tries to figure out which pictures I was going to be using in order to represent both sides to a story. That is why I needed two pictures. Now one of the pictures was taken from afar and on my computer it looked extremely blurry. So what I had to do was to look for the picture again on my camera and took a picture of the picture. it worked out and it doesn't look blurry. I was in between two pictures, but the one that I picked allowed me the space at the top to include a "review" and the film festival selection logos. 

Now to festival logos were another issue that I ran into.

Many people would choose the obvious, Sundance Film Festival and I had that on my poster until I realized that my documentary is a series which made me question which festivals accept episodic content. 

Now you might be wondering why not Sundance. And the problem was that the running time of the entire series must add up to 180 minutes. Now I could do the documentary separately by episode but I felt like the best thing was to show them together. So I didn't do Sundance. 

So after the list above, and more research not shown on the page, I decided that the film festivals in the United States that allowed for episodic content was Hot Spring Doc Film Festival, SXSW Film Festival and SF Film. I went through about 20 film festival website requirements to figure out if they accepted episodic content. 

Now after I finished looking for the film festivals, I had a problem finding a logo for Hot Spring because there wasn't one with a transparent background. So I found an old one and I deleted the year, which worked out. 

Another issue that I ran into while working on this poster, was the credits. Those credits actually killed me. No seriously. It took me about three or even more hours to figure it out. So I don't have photoshop which would have most likely made my life easier. So what I did is I found a movie poster credit font that I could use and downloaded it. At first everytime I would type the "directed by' or the "edited by" etc. would show up and I didn't know how to type my name, but I figured it out that I needed to use the caps lock for it to work. So when I figured that out I thought that I was done, but that was not the truth. I needed to figure out how I could make the background of the text transparent, which is what took me the longest. I looked up a tutorial on YouTube on how to do it using Pages on Mac. It worked but it was a real struggle. I took a while for me to handle it, but in the end I figured it out. Though it is not the best quality, I tried my best. 

Now the poster is technically done, except for the website domain, which I am working on the website and when I publish I will write the name on the poster.

I also wanted to talk about the PBS Logo at the bottom which is seen in docuemntaries that have been acuqired by PBS like "Dolores" and "Bill Nye: Science Guy" . These were both on distributed first on a film festival and later acquired by PBS. 

GROUP MEETING #2

During this group meeting, I talked to my peers about my struggle with the poster. 

Let me explain. Due to my target audience being a large one (15+ students and parents) it means that the poster will have to change depending on where it is going to be. For example, my final poster will be the ones integrated into a film festival that includes the credits and the official logos of the film festival. But when PBS acquires the film or even when PBS distributes to Netflix and Amazon, the poster would look different. For this reason, I have decided that though my final poster will be the one distributed to the film festival first, I will create another poster in order to fit my target audience. 

In my next post, I will be talking about the poster and how it is going. 

Poster Ideas

I had many ideas of what the illustration for the poster would look like. 

Let me start here... 

Warning I am not a good drawer!

But this was the very first idea that I wanted to do. A gun that says constitutional to represent the side of the gun control debate: that guns are part of the constitution in the second amendment and the finger would say gun control demonstrating the side of people who want gun control. I was also thinking that instead of the finger to use a flower, but it felt more about the Vietnam War than the debate about gun control. Instead of the finger, I could have also done the constitution, but the image of the gun would have to be mine and I just found it difficult to do. 

This is another idea that I had for the poster. I first portion with the gun I mentioned above about the Constitution of the United States and the gun. But I won't be doing that. 

I then thought about doing a sea of bullets with the people that have died due to gun violence and either the flag of the United States or Lady Liberty. Lady Liberty is holding a book that I thought would have been great to say "our right" and the sea of bullets "our life".  Though I really liked this idea, I didn't have an original picture of the statue of Liberty. So then I thought that the Washington Monument would work well. I am still working on it because I am debating if it actually explains the sides of both debates, but I have also changed my mine and have more idea that I am trying to develop to create a concise poster that everyone who sees it understands what the documentary will be about. 

Edit Day 2

Edit Day two went way better than day one. 

Though I still didn't have a plan on how I wanted to organize the documentary, I decided to just go with the flow and see what happens. I will create a rought draft of what I think my work and see where I got from there. 

I have currently been working for about the last three hours and I have edited about two minutes of the documentary. I know that there are some problems and I know some sections are long, but this is what I am considering my rought draft and I hope to have an entire week of wrapping everything up before it is done. For instance, making the clips shorter, etc. (the small details). 

It is a work in progress. I have been playing with the audio of some of the footage that I have; I sometimes feel like the audio is great, but not the footage, but we will see what happens later when I edit it further because I continue to change the structure. It is totally different from day one editing day. 

Edit Day 1

To say it in a minimal amount of words, editing on day one went terribly. I have about 45 minutes+ of footage and I just don't really know how I want to organize my film. I have decided that the excerpt that I am doing is from Episode 3 talking about the opinion of students. So I spent about three hours trying to figure out how I want to organize it and that did not go well. 

Last year felt easier, not just because it was shorter but because I dictated my editing with the help of the music and the film opening had a structure. Since it was a film opening, I did a storyboard, but when it comes to documentaries you can't really do that because you don't know what situation you will be present in.  When it comes to documentaries, we are expressing part of a story, not a complete story from beginning to end so I can create it in any way I want. And I think that is what I found most difficult. 

I hope that day two of editing goes much better. 

Parkland, Florida

On Feburary 14, 2018, 17 people where killed in Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School in Parkland, Florida, half an hour away from where I reside. This event lead me to create a documentary based on the debate of gun control that has surfaced. 

On March 24, 2018 a national march took place, March for Our Lives. I got to attend the one in Parkland and conducted some interviews. 

Let me just start off that in one of the previous post I said that I was going to challenge the handheld camera element, which I did in the interviews that I did at my school, but coming into Parkland, it was a hassle not just to carry, but we would of had to leave the line that we where in, in order to get into another line for people who had bags that were not clear. So my dad just took the bag back to the car (it was a long walk) and I just resulted in using my hands and record hand held like many documentarist do. 

I got five interviews in from various individuals trying to get different perspectives. I was there for about two hours.

If you are wondering I got sunburned and I also was thrown out of a section that was meant for press. I didn't really see much press, but whatever. I got like 10-15 seconds of someone singing. 

I met an individual while waiting in line to enter the park those kids live near Columbine a shool shooting that happened twenty years ago. 

Out of the 5 interviews that I got one was really blurry and there were about two that were somewhat blurry. It wasn't as bad as that one in which my camera just decided to focus on the background and not the individual. So the only thing that I could focus on when watching the video is my mother in the background. So I will most likely not use that interview. We shall see. 

I met another individual who claimed to have seen me before. I don't know from where and at that moment while interviewing him I was confused because I didn't know who he was until I rewatched the footage and made me realize that I have seen him before, I just don't know from where. He probably was at our high school because he said he was finishing school online. So that was every interesting.

All the interviews were very well spoken and they eleborated when they felt was necessary. When I was about the leave. I say Jackie who was seated on the grass, holding up a sign. She looked confident and powerful, so I went up to her to ask her some questions. She was nervous, I could tell, but I think she gave the best interviews of all.  She would eleborate and create an atmosphere where she and I were just having a conversation and it felt nice and I got to understand her opinion on this issue. While interviewing Jackie, her mom in the back would agree with the things her daughter was saying and the questions that I had asked. They were wonderful and brilliant individuals and I was happy that I got to interview her. 

In one of my previous post I had about 20 questions but before going to the march I added a couple.

1. How do you feel about teachers being armed?

2. In a recent article that I read, one of the individuals who spoke at Florida's State capitol said that "adults have failed  " do you think this is true?

3. Some students in High School were given detention for walking out of school protesting against gun control. What do you think about this?

This is Jackie

This is Jackie and her mom

I do have to say that this march brought different people, from parents with very young chidlren, some in strollers and others running around to students my age, parents and grandparents. It was a time of coming together and fighting for what they believe. But I also got to encounter people who were against gun control, who I didn't have the chance the interview. 

I realized that this issue is not just gun control in school but also gun control for minority communities who have suffered gun violence for many years. 

"Guns prevent Life, Liberty, and Happiness" 

(Life, Liberty, and Happiness are mentioned in the Declaration of Independence) 

I wanted to share some pictures I took myself of  March for Our Lives in Parkland, Florida

This was the section that I was thrown out of. 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/downers-grove/news/ct-met-downers-grove-high-schools-protesters-detention-20180316-story.html 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/opinion/students-walkout-gun-protest.html