blog post 4

This week my group took our firt step towards starting out actual filming.
Yesterday we picked up a camera and this weekend while I'm on vacation with
My family I am going to shoot some b-roll of my family. We are still not
Quite sure what our focus is because we have not found enough time to do the
interviews with our whole group and we thought it would be best if I did not
interview my family but someone else in the group did so we are going to do
that during the week next week.

Blog #3

This week my group presented our pitch to the class, John, Alex, Ms. Hodge, and Neil. I think the pitch went fairly well, John and Alex thought we had a good idea but they started asking us how we were going to tell the story in our documentary. We did not know how to tell the story and we still are not quite sure. It is hard to plan out the story before we do the interviews because we are not sure exactly what the story is going to be. I think that the next step we need to take in making our documentary is interviewing our main subjects so we know what the focus is and what the story is, then we will know who else to interview and what questions to ask them.

As I read Research, Research, Research: You Can't Say it Enough! by Trish Das I learned that there are many different ways to research your topic. It surprised me how many ways there were. For instance I did not know that interviewing people whoa re not experts on your subject are a good way to learn more about your subject. Now that I think about it that is a very good way because you want to know how to relate your topic to the human perspective and what better way to figure out how to do that than talking to actual human beings. Another thing that surprised me was how many layers of facts there were on each subject. This reading made me realize how important research is and how much should be done.

Documentary Blog Post #2

So far my group has decided that we want to focus our documentary on adoption. We have also decided we would like to use a personal aspect and interview my family for the film. One challenging thing is that we do not know what aspect of adoption to focus on. We have decided to interview my family and see what aspect seems to be the most important or moving and then go from there. We still need to figure out who to interview as an expert but my mom works for an adoption agency so she will be able to help us. We are all working together very well and are all very enthusiastic about our topic.

The reading made me think of documentaries more widely, meaning that more movies are some form of a documentary. For instance I would have never have thought that The Social Network could be considered a documentary. I mean everyone in the movie was a paid actor. I did know that is was based on true events but i didn't know that could classify it as a documentary. When I saw it it seemed to me as if it was just another big blockbuster hit based on a true story. After reading this I feel like at the beginning or end of each movie there should be disclaimer telling the viewer exactly what aspects of the film are "real". In film what is "real"? I do not know if there is a way to answer that.