Documentary Filmmaking J Term - Part 1

During my J Term of my junior year, I took documentary filmmaking. During this course, I was put into a group with two other people to make a documentary. Our documentary was a "doc ception" type of documentary, which means that we made it about the other documentary crews. We would go around and film them as they were working, and we would also conduct "talking head" style interviews. I was the cinematographer for our group, which was a really fun experience. I also got to help make the trailer for our documentary.

I think that the CAS outcome I fulfilled during this J term is "Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively". Throughout this J Term, I had to work with my crewmates on each step of the filmmaking process. All three of us had to work together to plan the documentary, which included things like deciding on shot types and coming up with interview questions. As the cinematographer, I collaborated very closely with the director of our documentary to make sure that each shot that I took came out the way she envisioned it and/or the way we had planned for it to look. Finally, we all worked together on editing our film to make sure that everything worked smoothly and looked good. This experience definitely helped prepare me for the film industry, which is an industry I want to go into in the future. It helped me prepare by allowing me to work with a crew, which is something I will be doing a lot of in college and after. It also helped me learn how to use new types of equipment like a camcorder and a boom mic, neither of which I had used before.