We made it!

I have exported the final sequence for the screening and hopefully it will turn out to be a nice one tonight.

This is really a great quarter. I'm really excited that we finally made it. At this point, I would say that all the videos I made before this project are just “videos,” but I am confident to call this project a real “film”.

Overall reflection

The key to a successful documentary is definitely how to get the scenes especially the climax in order to build a complete story arc. One strength of our film I think is that it really got a story arc there. And to do that we need to really push hard and explore the real story behind obvious things.

For example, without the dad scene, I feel that this project will mostly be like a public relation video made to promote the show. It's very important to predict when dramatic moments will happen and make sure to be there and capture the moments. And also, it takes some sort of luck.

Besides, one thing that I learned when building the structure of the story is that we need to find a balance in the overall mood of the film. Sometimes people (including me) will have this stereotypical image of documentary that it always tell miserable people's stories and it's just about the bad things and the pains. So what I think is that it should have some light-hearted or even fun parts in it to entertain the audience.

Challenge of documentary

I feel that whether a documentary works or not depends on if there’s something dramatic happening in front of the lens. And that required great patience and efforts.

Since this is not fiction film, we can't expect everything is dramatic and usable in later edit. So I sometimes felt bored and didn't know what to shoot and when to shoot. I can hardly imagine how they made those documentary projects that last for years. I don’t know if I can maintain that passion. And also there’s a possibility that everything is flat and the film turns out to be mediocre. So there's definitely a lot of challenges and risks in pursuing this kind of documentary about people's story. But that's also why this work is so rewarding.

Lessons

I made two big mistakes when shooting. One is that the camera ran out of power and shut down during the climax moment. Luckily we have the school’s camera recording the sound so we are still able to show that part completely. Another mistake is formatting the 64GB SDcard without backup. It’s just lucky that I didn’t choose to format the card that has the climax footage. Otherwise this whole film would be ruined.

I still feel very nervous when I think about these things. But they both gave me really important lessons that I would always keep in mind.

Technical stuffs

This is the first time that I do careful lighting set-ups. In theory it seems easy but actually it really took a lot of time in the field. There are many things that I need to care about, like background, depth, lens flare... I learned a lot from the practice.

BTW, Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera is really great… I was hesitating that whether I should buy this one or just use my Canon 60D to do this film. I’m glad I made the right choice. It just looks so beautiful and “high-end” and made color-grading so relaxing and easy.

Next steps

We will definitely submit this film to some festivals and awards. I want to see how far it can go.

After that, I think we will put it on the web, like Vimeo. We can then use some social media to spread this film to a larger audience. I actually hope this film can be displayed in the documentary channel of Vimeo. From the statistics shown there, I think it has a large base of audience there.

Future

I hope that I can go somewhere or find some like-minded producers to continue doing this kind of documentary.

After this project, I feel much more confident and comfortable in shooting, editing and post production. I totally believe that I can do these jobs effectively and efficiently. But my weakness is that I’m still not good at finding story ideas and getting access to sources and possible characters. In this project Andrew did most of that and I think for now I don’t have that ability. But I will keep pushing myself.

Thank you!

I want to thank my professor Brent Huffman to provide this great course and really push us to make this project work. And I want to thank my classmates and colleagues Andrew and Avinash.

(Some of my friends here in Medill told me that Andrew is the most gentle and nice guy in the program. And I totally agreed with that after this coorperation. haha:) )

I feel really glad and lucky that he invited me to work with him and always trusted me, both in shooting and editing. I really appreciated it.

This is really a great ending in this wonderful journey in Medill.