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!