Critical Reflection!

 

When we came up with the idea of this documentary, we really wanted to stress the idea that arts have a major impact on society as whole. By representing young artists in the industries of film, music, and theater, we thought that would be the best way to stress that idea since many are not really accepted for those career choices. As someone who makes films and wants to be part of this industry in the future, I have never really received support from my family as they believed this wasn’t career choice for me and that I should choose careers like business, or law, or in the medical profession to live a “good life” but once I realized there are is a future in my career through the things I make and the things I do with it which made many people in my family realize I had a shot. For me personally, I wanted to show this documentary to other artists who may be struggling with the same issues and prove to them that they do make an impact in this society whether big or small, their art is worth keeping alive.  

When researching for this documentary, I knew that we wanted to develop a special style within our documentary. Something visually pleasing that would keep the audience engaged and keep them attached to our subjects as well as our overall plot. Within my research certain examples such as “American Promise” and “A Robus Heart” in the New York Times Op-Doc series really emphasized to me the importance of 1) being very authentic with the interviews and what I was asking but also to keep it beautiful and focused on them specifically.

Other documentaries such as “The Incongruent Congruent Outlook of Two Insecure Teenage Boys” helped me really think of the way I wanted my b-roll to look like and the coloring I wanted to use for the documentary. In addition, because of these documentaries I wanted to practice the use of indirect interviews to challenge myself but to also let the interviews tell their story for themselves, since I believed it would have a bigger impact on the audience compared to direct interviews. I also wanted to include the use of archived and filmed b-roll to bring both that sense of realness and present moment into the doc. 

For this documentary our main target audience was between the ages of 15-19 since we are focusing on the teenagers and young artist who are just now figuring out what they want to do in life for example, I didn’t realize I wanted to do film until I was around 13-14 so this documentary would’ve really motivated me to keep going when I first decided after a year of working on my craft. But I feel like this piece connects with our audience and engages with them because of the content we are creating and the message we developed. One critique that we received from a former classmate was “The documentary conventions used tied the piece together very nicely and made it seem like I was watching a professional documentary.” (Miguel Cabrera) and “From the beginning of the doc, Binder caught my eye. I was automatically intrigued by the music, the title, and the inspirational quote “Every Artist Was First an Amateur The quote worked very well with their purpose, which was to get into the lives of artists that’re parts of different art niches.” (Natalia Szabo) which can illustrate not just the level of high quality of our documentary considering we are high school students but also illustrate how indirect interviews, the use of music, the archived and filmed b-roll, and the questions we asked played a big part within the documentary making the audience feel really connected to what we wanted to say. However, there are things that could have been improved.

Some critiques we additionally got was “I would make sure your stylistic choices are consistent throughout the piece, each part felt and looked different than the other.” (Mya Wolf) as well as “While each of the parts was great, I think the focus for each one of them could have been a bit clearer. I mentioned this in the group, but Monica’s part was specifically about music and that is all she talked about, but Santiago’s part was about film, and he talked about making music so I would have taken those parts out, especially since the documentary ended up being about 12 minutes long.” (Samantha Duarte). During our discussion in class after submitting

the documentary I did agree with these critiques because one of the struggles we had during the editing process was figuring out how we wanted to transition everything so hearing from our peers helped us immensely as in the future we know that we can make those changes in order to have a better product. I also like the fact that I got to go over the documentary with Ms. Stocklosa, our advisor, to take it to the next level and make it as good as we can in order to be able to attend competitions as well as film festivals. Through our documentary we wanted to develop a sense of branding through different ways. First, our Production name “TAME Productions” as a team we wanted to be represented together as young filmmakers, so we believed the first best step to do this was to develop something that was just ours. But overall, I loved this production so much and what we did as a team was really great. Could things improve? Of course, nothing is perfect and there is always room for improvement but to Ava, Tai and I this was probably one of the most creative and high-quality things we have ever developed not just as a team but individually as well. I am so glad I got to work with this amazing team of filmmakers who have taught me so much and I can’t wait to see what TAME Productions will do in the near future.