Critical Reflection (Behind the Fire Wall Documentary - 5/5)

(me reflecting critically)

How does your product represent social groups/issues?

Our documentary was about a social issue, censorship in schools and how it affects queer students. Queer students where interviewed in our documentary, but we choose to not have them mention it so that the students may represent a unified front. Pointing out the minorities within the group might ruin that illusion. Our documentary focused on how the student's environment became hostile after censorship. Though, I didn't do that well of a job representing how it makes the individuals feel. This fails to represent the emotional aspect of the issue. 

How does your product engage with audiences?

We thought that presenting information mostly though interviews would make the piece more engaging, so we tried to keep Emi's on screen appearance to a minimum. That being said, the piece is extremely lacking with b-roll. This made the visual aspect of the film lag behind for the final few moments of the documentary. 
But, as for the content, I think the documentary was engaging to my target audience— students and teachers as well as people interested in sociological discussion. This is because the question is interesting, and I haven't seen much covered on it, especially not focused on queer students.

How did research inform your product and the way it uses or challenges conventions?

It doesn't take a genius to notice how bias my documentary is. I have very strong feelings towards this topic and it shows. This was mainly inspired by the opinionated documentaries we watched as a class assignment. I like how they argued for something, without saying it outright. Obviously my piece's argument isn't at all subtle, but seeing these documentaries helped me better understand the convention of stating an argument in opinionated documentary pieces. 

Another convention I learned of was to get as much footage as possible. I leant this from a class discussion about American Promise (2014). The producers of the documentary had so much footage to pick from, so every clip was absolutely intentional. American Promise inspired me to get as many interviews as possible— 13 to be precise. If I remember correctly, I had 4 hours of footage to edit, excluding b-roll. This allowed my documentary to have a very rich context, since I had such a large pool of interviews and phrases to dig through. Everyone added a new perspective to the piece.

(one more pic for good measure)