Making a schedule....but we are both insanely busy

This is the show me & Mariana are doing!

OK! So, I think the both of us might actually go insane figuring out a proper schedule for this project. Both me and Mariana are in Theatre at our school, and this week we have tech rehearsals every day from 3-6, and next week we perform from Wednesday-Friday at 6 pm (and we likely won't be able to go home in between school and the show). I also have rehearsals every Sunday from like 9-5 so those days are also super busy for me. I think we will try to do more of a weekly outline of what we want done every week and we will figure out the details as we go, but I want to have specific deadlines for when each part of our project should be DONE. Here is my schedule plan:

2/23-3/1:

2/23: Have our project option and general idea DONE and set in stone

2/25: Properly decide what we would want for our genre, target audience, etc.

Complete blogs throughout week: Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday

3/2-3/8:

3/2: Research social media, decide what type of social media page we will create

3/3: Create a schedule for when everything will be filmed, tentative dates and reach out to people to be featured in the film.

3/4: Outline our entire film component, firm concept that won't be changed after this week

Complete blogs throughout week: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday

3/9-3/15

3/10: Solid script for project finalized

3/11: Work on any outlying planning that should be done

3/13: FINALIZE filming dates, possibly even begin filming

Complete blogs throughout week: Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday

3/16-3/22: SPRING BREAK, Me & Mariana have a field trip from Wednesday-Saturday

3/16: Work on print component

3/17: Film as much as possible, continue filming on trip if we have to

3/20: Make sure social media is being kept up with 

Complete blogs throughout week, from this point on it will be hard to predict when each post can get done, depends on what we accomplish on what day.

3/23-3/29:

3/25: Finalize film, all editing done.

3/28: Finalize digital and print aspects of project, make sure all parts of those are done

3/29: Begin Critical reflection planning

3/30- 4/5:

3/30: Continue critical reflection planning

4/2: Begin writing the critical reflection

4/6-4/10:

4/7: Critical reflection finished, work w/ Mariana and peer edit 

4/8: FINALIZE critical reflection

All of the project should be done at this point!! Have everything fully uploaded by 4/10!

Portfolio project time!!

Mariana & Me!

I'm back!! It's finally time for possibly the most stressful part of the year...and also creating my A Level portfolio project!! I'm working with one of my closest friends, Mariana A., and I'm super excited to see what we come up with! I know we are very like-minded people, and we have pretty similar schedules, so I hope we can create a project we are both very happy with and proud of.

In class, we went over the different options we could do for our portfolio projects, and Mariana agreed with me that our options are going to be a Short Film or a Documentary. Choosing exactly what it will be will definitely be a bit difficult for us just because we both are very particular people and I know how the both of us work when it comes to having an actual concept. For us, that will probably be the most difficult part of the entire project.

For a documentary, we would need to think of a topic that could work as an entire series, rather than just one episode. I remember when we did the documentary project in semester one we focused on the arts, which we realized was severely overdone by students. The thing is that this is something me and Mariana are super involved in outside of school, so creating this concept and gathering footage was relatively easy for us. When we watched an example documentary project in class, we recognized that we should head a totally different direction if we decide to do this option for our project, so we would definitely need to brainstorm this some more.

With a short film, coming up with a general idea would be difficult, but once we have that we would easily be able to develop the idea way further and involve our own creative elements. We have been interested in creating a short film since the second semester of sophomore year, though, so we are slightly attached to this option, even with no actual ideas behind it. Another issue we may have is coming up with an idea that isn't super cliche or overdone, and we may feel a lot of pressure to come up with something. Knowing us what we come up with could definitely end up being too abstract and sort of undoable, so we definitely need to consider that too.

Project Reflection

How does Lineage represent social groups/issues?

My film, Lineage, aimed to show how a community, that would otherwise never exist, forms around the "intergenerational shows" that the local theatre company, Inside Out Theatre Company, produces. My group had decided we wanted to use interviewees of two completely different ages to achieve this goal and properly represent two sides of the topic. 

Since me and Mariana are heavily involved with this company, and the show we focused on, we decided to also pick two very different actors that came from two very different acting backgrounds. Lito, is older, and has been working with gymnastics for a very long time, but has been doing theatre for shorter, whereas Brandon is still a teenager, and he has been participating in theatre since slightly before high school. The show itself is also heavily about Jewish culture and how hard it was to live in Russia during the time it takes place, and while we do not directly explain this story, it heavily implies that the show should be watched eventually.
How does Lineage engage with audiences?
Lineage strives to invest the audience in the concept of intergenerational shows, especially since they are open to anyone. That also means that you can be any age, with no experience whatsoever, such the aspiration and want to participate in the show. Our main target audience is all ages and genders, as long as they are invested slightly in musical theatre. It is slightly annoying since we were given specific instructions to not focus on how the arts effects our lives, but I wanted this specifically to be a sit-down lunch with all of the friends in the group.
To specifically engage with the younger audience, we decided to make it clear how the cast has many silly moments without knowing the camera is on them. A large thing I noticed about younger audiences is that they become too ashamed to admit that they love their passions. The talk of Fiddler on the Roof being like a large family definitely also convinces audience members that this is probably the type of documentary that they would like.
How did research inform Lineage and the way it uses or challenges conventions?
A very important thing I focuses on during both my research and the project itself was B-Roll. I wanted to capture perfect moments that represented exactly what my interviews would say. That being said, I used this plan as a reason to have the b-roll filming be after the filming of the interviews. Filming b-roll definitely would have been easy, but my group's cinematographer got sick the day we had planned to film this. This is when I had to challenge the conventions of a regular documentary, as our entire film only consists of b-roll that was archived footage. This, of course, didn't look bad, but it didn't have the same look as we had initially planned.
A convention that we did follow, though, was our particular USE of the b-roll. We had tried our hardest to make the b-roll directly relate to what the interviewees were saying (for example, when Lito talks about the man playing the Rabbi, we showed a video of the Rabbi on stage, or when he says it was a super fun environment and a video of the cast playing just dance is shown.) 

Link to Lineage :)

Almost done, done, done!

 Now we are in the post-production process! Originally, this post probably would have been about us recording B-roll during a rehearsal of one of the company's current shows, but Mariana, the cinematographer, got really sick and we weren't able to go. This is when I was super grateful that we had a TON of archived footage we could rely on. I immediately sent all of this archived footage to David, who was our editor, and we sorted through everything to find items that would be adequate for the documentary.

We reviewed all of our interview footage and decided our documentary name decided in planning was genuinely perfect, since Brandon had spent a while answering one of the interview questions by saying that the casts of the intergenerational shows was like a huge family, hence the name being "Lineage." After this, David unfortunately was on vacation, and it was a bit hard to contact him, but our group still managed. Since he was our editor, it was sort of as if the rest of our work was done unless he needed more footage. So, I was always on standby to send more B-Roll.

Something that slightly annoyed me about this was that he didn't have access to the original outline, so he wasn't able to follow it either. The final format of the documentary wasn't EXACTLY what I had hoped for, but it wasn't bad by any means. Lito's interview, which was supposed to have less focus, was featured for the entire beginning portion of the film. I wish that the interviews sort of went back and forth between each other, especially since the two interviewees said the same, or very similar, answers to the majority of the questions.

Finally, David sent the final product, and the group really liked it! I think if we had more time to do this project, it definitely would have been way better of a final product on our end, but overall, I think we did a good job!

In the works...

 It's time to begin filming! We had officially delegated everyone's roles in the filming of the interviews. I was specifically put in charge of asking the interviewees questions and adding more questions as we went if I felt as though it was needed. Below are the interview questions I had prepared for Lito and Brandon:

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS 

Before beginning the interview, please be prepared to state and spell your full name 

BRANDON: 

What does ‘intergenerational activities’ mean to you? 

What experience do you have in these shows? 

What have you gained from these experiences? 

How was the environment different between the intergenerational shows and morespecified age group shows?

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS 

Before beginning the interview, please be prepared to state and spell your full name 

Other Interviewees/ questions 

Why did you decide to join shows or a program like this? 

How do you feel when you participate in big intergenerational events like this? 

How do you think you have grown from this experience working in intergenerational shows? 

Were there any challenges while working with various ages?

Mariana was in charge of the camera and was zooming in and out when she felt it was necessary. In addition to this, David brought a bunch of equipment and made sure the audio was working while we filmed. Samara helped Mariana with the shots and sometimes adjusted the lighting. (Sadly, we didn't get any pictures of our setup ☹)

We filmed at the Sunrise Civic Centre, which is where rehearsals for Fiddler on the Roof, and the production itself took place. We got special permission from Robin, the director and owner of Inside Out Theatre Company to film at this location. An issue we ran into was not being able to change/adjust the space to be more to our liking for the interviews, so there are some things in the shots that I wish could have been done differently.

What's up, Doc? (Planning post!!)

 After we finished watching all of the documentaries in class, it was finally time to start working on our docs! We got to pick our own groups, so I got to work with Mariana, David, and Samara. When we were discussing possible ideas of what our documentary would be about, me and Mariana brought up a show we were just in, Fiddler on the Roof. Of course, we can't make a documentary about a show that already happened, but we were more focused on an aspect of the production that occurs at the company we go to often.

Fiddler was what Inside Out Theatre Company calls one of their "Intergenerational Shows," since
anybody over the age of 13 is able to audition and be a part of these shows. The reason we wanted to focus on this specifically is because we figured it would be a great opportunity to hear from different cast members their opinions on how it differs from activities with specified age groups. 

Since me and Mariana personally know these people, we had to make the decisions of who we would be interviewing. Fiddler specifically was special, since this had the widest age range out of any intergenerational show done at Inside Out, so we knew we had to pick good representations of these people. A large concern that was raised was interviewing people under the age of 18, obviously it would be amazing to have these interviews, especially given our topic, but we would have had to get each interviewee's legal guardians permission too, to ensure no issues would come up when we are already in the post-production process. Since we knew we wouldn't have much time to make this documentary, we didn't want to risk having to wait even longer to begin filming, especially since it is hard enough already to get a date that works for the adult interviewees. Luckily, we had many cast members in mind that were on the younger side of legally being an adult (they were 18, to be exact). 

Me and Mariana immediately had two people in mind to be our main interviewees: Brandon and Lito. You might actually recognize Brandon from my project last year! He was one of the background characters and helped me a lot with the technical aspects of the film opening. Brandon is 18, so I knew he would be a better representative for the 'younger' ages. He also played Avram and the Constable in Fiddler, so there were moments when he worked closely with our other subject, Lito. Lito played Tevye, and he has been working with Inside Out for many years. We knew his work ethic and sense of professionalism would make him the perfect choice as one of our interviewee's.

After we had decided we were for sure going with these two, I had started planning interview questions. Samara had helped me finalize a few of those. Then I reached out to Robin Braun, the director of Fiddler to see if there was a date the production team and the interviewees could come in to film our interviews. Luckily, she said yes and we could come in on that next Monday! I reached out to the interviewees to confirm the date with them, and then my group prepared for production.

WE'RE SOO BACK (+ New projects in A level)!!

Hello Cambridge!! I'm so incredibly excited to come be back on my blog for another year of AICE Media!!! In class, we had done lots of research for our first big project, creating a documentary. We discussed the many different types of documentaries and the conventions they use - this is when I realized not all documentaries are boring - and then we started watching some documentaries to actually see these conventions in place.

The very first documentary we watched was an episodic documentary called Abstract. In Abstract, each episode highlights a different art form and a popular creator that specializes in it. In class, we watched the costume design episode with Ruth E. Carter. This was super interesting to me since, without knowing, I always complimented her costuming in any movie I watched that she worked on. 

After watching this we were told to go home and watch another episode of the documentary of our choice. Since this episode definitely would've been the one I picked it honestly took a while to figure out what I would want to watch, but I finally decided on Tinker Hatfield's shoe design episode.

These two episodes of Abstract gave me amazing examples of b-roll, which I definitely needed to know a lot about before planning my documentary. This also did a great job at establishing a branding and style for the documentary, which was consistent between the two episodes. It became one of my goals to be able to do the same thing.

Then the class watched American Promise. This was genuinely such a great documentary (so great that I went home and made my mom watch it). Watching this documentary has specifically helped me recognize how much time, money, work, and effort goes into some documentaries. Specifically, I had recognized just how much planning I would need to do for my documentary. It helped me set another goal for my documentary, find a way to make the film continuously entertaining and engaging. Something I noticed about this film was that I never got bored throughout all classes we spent watching it.

After this we watched Exit Through The Gift Shop, this one was a bit more confusing, but I still liked it a lot (maybe that is because I love street artists and was genuinely interested in the topic). Anyways, this film used a whole lot of archived footage. Knowing this, I loved being able to see how the archived footage could be used in documentaries as b-roll, or just regular footage, as long as it genuinely applies to the topic. This was super helpful for me, so I knew not everything needed to be staged to have fitting footage for my documentary.

Finally, we were asked to watch op-docs from the New York Times website. For this, everyone in the class got to pick any 2 op-docs that interested them. Knowing that our documentaries were most likely expected to be a bit more like these, I had decided to watch two completely different ones to get an understanding of different techniques and styles used by different creators.

After each documentary, the class was required to complete a set of discussion questions to help us recognize the different conventions and techniques used in each documentary. Immediately when I began to write my first one, I had recognized I would likely need to reference back at them so I could properly plan my own documentary, so once I had finally finished up the last questions for the op-docs, I was ready to start planning!