Documentary
Reflection
After going back and forth between
several ideas, my documentary group decided to make a film about thrift stores.
Over the past few years, more young people have taken an interest in thrift
store clothing. At the local Value Village, where shirts are sold anywhere from
$1.99 to $9.99, the low prices aren’t always the main appeal among the younger
audiences. Of course, students on a tight budget are known to be shameless
bargain-seekers, but people are also drawn into “thrifting” because of the
unique styles and high quality garments. Even people in the upper middle financial
bracket are skipping designer stores and going instead to scour the racks at
the thrift store to find trendy vintage clothing. Our group was curious to seek
out the appeal of shopping at the thrift store by interviewing students,
customers, and fashion bloggers. I think it was a solid idea to start with this
broad scope and narrow down our topic as we learned more from filming. I know
Mr. Mayo was very skeptical of our idea to begin with, but it worked out well
to have a lot of freedom in the planning process.
We started out the filming process by
sending small groups to Value Village to collect B-roll footage. We ended up
trying on outfits and interviewing customers as well while we were there. I
learned that we probably should have planned our filming schedule a little bit
better because all of our clips were really disorganized and hard to put
together. During the production, we found out about a site called Thrift Store
Runway, a fashion contest sites that judges the best thrifted outfits under
$50. Mr. Mayo gave us the idea to sumbit a few of our looks to the website. We
didn’t win any of the prizes for the month, but we were still able to feature
our experience in the documentary as well as interview a couple of expert judges
from the site. In addition to that footage, we did a lot of interviews with students
at Blair.
By the time we finished uploading
all of our footage, we had 90 minutes of film to go through. That was probably
the most challenging part of this project for our group because the computers were
slow and it took a long enough time to watch each clip and erase what we weren’t
going to use. It took a few weeks, but we were eventually able to cut down our
footage to fit within the time constraints. If I went back to remake the
documentary, I would make a better storyboard and stick to it. Our group got
really off track and we ended up with a good product, but we should have
started out with a stronger foundation. For next year, I think the documentaries
should be slightly longer, maybe 5-7 minutes. Three minutes was only enough to
scratch the surface of our topic and there was so much more that could have
been developed if the time frame was expanded. I think we should have had more
checkpoints during the process at well so we could meet with Mr. Mayo and
discuss where we were in the process and get feedback.
Overall, I was really pleased with
the final product. It was a really long process and I feel relieved to be done.
It was really stressful especially towards the end when we were trying to make
the due date with our final film. I hope that MCPS improves the computer system
for next year because that was the stem of a lot of our technical problems. I
didn’t know much about interviewing people or editing in final cut before this
project and this was a really important milestone in my CAP career.
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