Documentary Reflection

Before starting this documentary, I knew very little about the DC statehood movement, how to schedule and conduct interviews, or how to structure and build a documentary.  Clearly, these are all crucial to making a documentary about DC statehood.  Considering this, it would seem that it would’ve been a long, painful learning process, and that the final product would’ve suffered accordingly.  However, looking back, nothing about it was painful, and it didn’t really even feel like school work.  Instead, I was able to learn all of these things while having fun, collaborating, and being creative.

            DC statehood is a grassroots movement, concentrated in the local political activists in DC.  It has a small base of support because many of the politically active in DC are focused on more national issues.  There is severe Republican opposition to statehood because DC is so liberal.  Also, the idea of 51 states scares some people.  However, those who believe in the cause are very devoted.  We talked to two activists, one of which had been involved in the cause for two years, and the other for about ten.  I felt a connection to this movement because these people believe so strongly in their cause, and despite many critics claiming it is impractical, they still have faith that it is a reality.

            The first step, and probably one of the hardest, in making our documentary was where to start.  We agreed on the issue pretty quickly.  I didn’t know much about it but I figured it would be interesting to learn and it would be fun to shoot because of our proximity to DC.  But after that, we had no idea what to do.  What I learned was in that situation, the best thing to do is to contact everyone you can think of, and hope some of it falls through.  After that, the rest was pretty fun.  We went to DC one morning, and did all of our shooting, conducting two interesting interviews and collecting valuable B-roll.  I think if I could do this part again, I would think a little more about what kinds of B-roll would be very useful, and try to focus on that.  After that came the other very difficult part in the process.  We had over an hour of footage, but we could only use about six minutes of it.  We had to watch everything, marking time codes of important parts.  Next came the most enjoyable part for me, which is building the rough cut and then slowly smoothing it out, polishing it, and giving it its real character.  Our biggest challenge of the whole documentary came during this stage, however.  That was our lack of time.  We did our best to overcome this challenge by putting in extra time, after school, on weekends, and on days we didn’t have exams.  We managed to get a pretty good version of the video in to C-SPAN in time.

            I think, overall, the environment and the resources in the classroom were very conducive to creating a good documentary.  The only thing I think we should’ve done differently is to start earlier, and really build our classes deadline around the C-SPAN deadline, that way it is more likely that more groups will try and submit their projects.  I think the dystopian trailer project could be compressed a little to make a little more room for the documentaries. 

            In conclusion, I think this project is very valuable because it allows students to fuse their political activism and interests with film.  For me, this project really got me interested and involved in editing and film-making.  I feel connected to this project because of all of the time I have put in, and because it is the first project for which I have done the majority of the editing.  Also, it is nice to have a project where all of the shots aren’t planned out, where we have to improvise and work with what we have.  Most importantly, it is good to have a project that gets us into society, learning things outside the classroom.