documentary process: critical reflection

 Create a 600-800 word critical reflection.  Be sure to use the tips/techniques that you learned during the critical reflection lesson.  You must respond to the following questions within your post:

• How did your research inform your product and the way it uses or challenges conventions?
• How does your product represent social groups or issues?
• How does your product engage with the audience?

            Our documentary, Pursuing Passion, was created to follow basic documentary conventions and implement them for a solid final product. Our theme was dance teachers at the Bamachol Dance Program who had studied another career and left it behind the "pursue passion". When we were deciding what to do with the project and how to structure it, we knew it was important to tell their stories correctly, which included in depth interviews. We interviewed our 4 main subjects on their past career, current path, and future at the dance studio. Despite the interviews being such a key factor content-wise, one of the most important things that we learned is that viewers often need a break when watching a talking head and it is easy to lose their attention. Due to this fact, Hannah and I focused on getting as much b-roll as we could, even if we wouldn't use it all in the final product. Both the use of b-roll with the voiceover of the interviews are important conventions to make a documentary flow and we consistently used that throughout to give our viewers breathing time. Another significant convention is appealing visuals to engage the audience and to keep them engaged with the piece from beginning to end. We made sure to implement this by being mindful of our interview background, having clean and aesthetic b-roll as well as including bright colors in a setting that could typically have bland rooms. We did have lots of technical issues and room for improvement since a lot of b-roll was used and not enough of the deep interview content. However, we did integrate these conventions and stuck to what we learned in class because it complemented our theme the most.

    The creation of this documentary and it's theme stemmed from Hannah and I's shared love for dance. We knew we did not only want to make a documentary that focused on the art of dance but an interesting twist that we haven't seen done before. Hannah told me about the studio and how all her instructors studied serious career paths in college such as law, nutrition and dentistry. We started warming up to the idea of basing our documentary off of how these adults strayed away from their typical career path to focus on what they loved the most. Often in our society, there's immense pressure on our 18 year old selves to choose a career that we might be interested and then to dedicate the rest of our lives to it. In Pursuing Passion we wanted to emphasize that even though the world is still focused on this academic norm of seeking the most "successful" career, small communities like Bamachol have at least put a crack in the norm. Hannah and I felt strongly about the fact that in our high school years, STEM careers have always been pushed onto us as the money making jobs while liberal arts majors have the "starving artist' stereotype. Both of us being students who want to pursue Film and Advertising This piece was so important socially because it showed that truly pursuing an interest doesn't mean that the work is left behind, the work is simply integrated into the interest.

    Our product engages with our audience because to us, it is niche but has a broader theme to it. It attracts dance lovers and those who participate in traditional Jewish dance studios, however, our audience isn't limited to that only. What I loved the most about our topic was how many people could be interested by it. The students our age said they liked the topic because the idea of choosing a career path as a teenager and spending our whole life sticking to that was scary and the documentary made them reflect. On the other hand when our parents saw it, they reminisced on how they studied and also told us their own stories about moment where they put their interests first. One of the aspects that worked the best to engage with our audience was the visuals. Dance is an art form so to us it was logical to focus heavily on composition and aesthetic so that our viewers could take in the "eye candy". We had a fun montage at the beginning that set the tone for the rest of the documentary and kept it pretty light hearted. We did realize after that the music was too distracting and that the topic could have been brought to a more serious tone, yet our final product did have unique factors which made it engaging. Other than visuals, our documentary had good pacing. There was never too much time on one subject (which could be good or bad if analyzed thoroughly), and we tried to tell the story within the time we had. 

(oh my god my reflection is 799)