Blog #4: She's too preoccupied with 1985.

Our documentary covered the decade of the 80s. Everything about that decade was over the top and bright and crazy and we wanted to capture all of that in our documentary. The first thing we needed to do was brainstorm what we were going to talk about under each category. I was away the first day of planning but Rachael and Justine came up with some great ideas. After talking and browsing the internet we got some pretty good ideas and started to think about how we could make it all work.

Once we decided what we were going to talk about in each part we basically just went to the internet to see what information we could get about a bunch of different things. Some things were harder to find information for than others, but we managed to get what we needed. We also decided what videos we were going to use along with what we filmed ourselves. We decided that Rachael and I would speak from the present and Justine would act like she was a host on MTV in the 80s.

Filming wasn't too difficult. Once we decided where we were going to film and Justine got her outfit together we were ready to go. Because we already knew what we were going to talk about for each part we simply wrote out a quick script so we could memorize what we wanted to say and then we filmed. We filmed small bits at a time so there wasn't a whole lot to remember at once.

We didn't encounter many problems filming, the main thing was getting the backdrop for Justine to stay up on the wall, I was afraid it was going to fall on her head while she was talking. Then we also had to figure out which order we were going to do each section in. We didn't want to have some of the less interesting topics at the end, we wanted to keep people entertained.

And who could possibly resist the awesomeness that is jazzercise?
Of course we messed up our lines a few times (which can be seen in the blooper reel) but other than that everything went relatively smoothly.

Once we had all the footage that we were filming ourselves we took the photos and videos we had compiled already and Justine began putting most of it together on movie maker. While she put our footage together along with some of the other videos, Rachael and I worked with pictures and put them all together with subtitles and narration.

When that was finished we put everything onto Justine's computer and added narration where it was needed along with music. Downloading the videos we needed took a bit of time because the program we used only let us do so many per day, and we needed to decide what clip of the video we wanted to use because we really only needed a couple minutes at the most.

After we cut the videos down and organized everything it was all put to music. Then Rachael did the intro and Justine was left to finish it off. I revised the story board so it matched up with what we did and did the works cited page.

We were pretty much finished and at school Justine surprised us with some awesome footage of her little sister. With just a little fine tuning we were all finished and I was really happy with how it turned out.

I would have put the finished product here, but after 4 hours of Blogger uploading it it told me that there was an error and to try again later. I doubt I'll be trying again. It was kind of an epic failure.
However, I feel like I shouldn't leave you with nothing, and therefore I'll let you enjoy this video right here...



Don't even lie. You laughed. I know you did.

After watching the rest of the class's documentaries I was pretty impressed with what people did. Most were very well done as far as what they covered and how they put everything together. I think that people should have taken into consideration the distance from which they filmed people speaking. Sometimes it was hard to hear someone because they were so far away, but that never happened throughout anyone's documentary.

I liked a lot of the music that people used, as well as the video clips. Most of those were really well done. The only thing was that some people, when showing pictures, didn't have any music or narration and I think that they should have so it wasn't just dead silence. I also think what people chose to film was done well, there was a lot of creativity.

There were also no documentaries that were too long. I didn't feel like any of them were dragging on and on and on. They were all very interesting, even when it came to topics that aren't necessarily as interesting such as architecture.

Overall I thought they were all really well done. I didn't have any major complaints about them. They all looked like some planning and thought had gone into them, which is important. It was really cool watching all of them.