REFLACTION TIME 💭💬

I am starting this disclaiming that this project had costed me many hours of sleep and tears!

    I had always set in my mind that I wanted to work by myself on this project as I did not intend to share the creation of something so meaningful to me with anyone. I always knew It would be A TON of work and responsibility. During the production of my project, I regretted my decision so many times. Now, I look back and I don’t regret this decision, not even a little bit. Even though my project did not turn out exactly how I wanted… I am so proud to look back and see that I challenged myself outside of my comfort zone, I am so proud I did not take the easy way around this 450 points project!

   This Documentary has always had the purpose of sharing the human, intimate connections the Cypress Bay Football Team constructs and cherishes.   I always wanted to keep this as CLOSE as possible to reality. I never wanted to introduce fancy staged b-rolls, like I have mentioned in my past posts after our research done in class with the documentaries we watched. I knew I would incorporate a great amount of archived footage and “natural” conversations along the interview. “The Sweat that Runs Thru Our Veins”

, through visual aspects, does a successful job at representing the aspect of family in a non-blood related relationship. The documentary starts with a montage of pictures on a wall, those pictures visually represent the cherished “family” the team has created. I chose the montage of pictures to start the documentary as it is a more sophisticated way to present archived b-roll and also illustrate the close bonds outside of the documentary; a way to show reality.

    Touching the human side. I always wanted this project to touch people’s hearts and feelings. My main audience breaks down to young adults (15-23),female and male who are interested on sports culture. I wanted it to break that SPORT aspect of football (i know this sounds crazy, as football is a sports). I wanted it to be viewed as I SEE IT! Talking about this team naked me emotional and noone has ever been able to fell it or understand it; I WANTED TO MAKE THE IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE! I am completely aware that my disgusting audio quality made this major factor almost improbable to happen(as people could barely hear it) But after listening to the critiques in class and reading out discussion assignments on canvas, I was positively surprised to find out I was somewhat successful at this mission. People were able to feel and understand the message I tried to deliver! *happy face*. It made me so happy to see my documentary achieve my goal of interaction with my audience.

      As I had mentioned In my previous posts… I always new… since before we started the preparation of this project that I would have VERY VERY VERY limited time with this project. And I knew I wanted to spend A LOT of time in pre production (80% in pre-production). So I took our research in class as a literal preparation for my project (instead of only viewing it as a way of understating documentaries, I actually took notes on what I wanted for MY PROJECT). We watched American Purpose, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Abstract and Op-Docs from the NY Times. As research on the genre I used my notes I took in class. But I spend LOTS of hours researching ways to fix messed audio. I used thousands of different AI programs, watched YouTube videos on how to fix it on Premier Pro… and the only thing I learned was to NEVER EVER record my audio in the camera without a back up. WHY?? Because nothing fixes the messed up audio! As I look forward to refilming my documentary… I took on paying attention to the critiques from my classmates so I can fix my errors!