Our task during the studio was to produce a documentary on a subject of our choice. Each student came up with a different subject and then from there we narrowed it down to two.One of which was how technology has been integrated not only into education, but also into society. In order to suite our subject we learned to film in certain settings and edit our film. We started  filming in Beaver Country School.This included filming class rooms, hallways, all school meetings and the exterior of the school. Once we started to get the hang of it, we wanted to get at least four or more interviews from Beaver students both upper and lower classmen. Once we had all the footage we uploaded and edited the film using Final Cut. The last step was to find music and voiceovers to complement the footage.  The final product is titled “Techover: Behind the Screen.”

MIND MAP & PITCH:

This project has been an interesting adventure with many things to overcome and deal with. We began the studio with making a mind map of what came to our minds when thinking about “mobility.”  A mind map is a brainstorming map where you have a main idea (in our case mobility) and include the smaller ideas that branch off the main idea, and even more detailed ideas that branch off the smaller ideas. Through this process, we came up with a topic of our own. We each individually chose compelling topics from the mind map and explored how they might work as a short documentary film and wrote a pitch on it.  The pitch was a form of writing that we used to sell our idea for a movie. We presented the idea, and chose the top two to be made into films.  Our group focused on creating a documentary on education and technology.

FINDING INTERVIEW CASE STUDIES:

Originally we wanted to interview two schools to get their perspective on education and technology at their schools.  We were going to compare and contrast the two school systems (public and independent school) by examining the students at those schools.  In order to do this, we have to get permission from a public school, so our first option was Cambridge Rindge and Latin.  This was not an easy process because none of us had experience with calling schools to be a part of a documentary film, so Biz taught us the proper way to communicate with the schools.  One of our team members stepped up and called the school but for some reason she received a different response as compared to Biz who was given a direct response.  In the end, we did not get access to the CRL students, so we started looking into other options.

Abby had connections to Needham High and Biz had connections to Newton South High, but even those schools did not give us access to interview their schools. Each time a school denied our group access to their school, we were reminded of this common theme that people fear that technology will define who they are through social networking websites.  Many kids have their identity defined based on their facebook page or instagram profile, and not based on who they are as a person inside and out. This led my group and I to change our documentary focus to how technology affects students inside and outside of school, academically and socially and use Beaver Country Day School as our single case study. Because of our idea getting shifted towards the end of the first week/beginning of the second week, our footage was shot very quickly and efficiently within the last few days of the second week of the studio. We divided ourselves as a group, two shooting footage at Beaver two processing/editing the footage that had already been taken. This simultaneous shooting and editing allowed us to complete filming with time to spare for finalizing editing. Through this process, we learned to save a lot on final cut pro as it tended to force quit unexpectedly.

Editing Process

During the editing process, we learned how to sort through a massive amount of footage. We did this by organizing it and deciding what we want to keep and what we can get rid of based on what we wanted our overall message to be. We organized it by watching all of the footage and if it was poorly filmed, we deleted it; if it was filmed well we kept it. We then went through the footage again and chose the footage that clearly portrayed the message we wanted our documentary to portray. We also learned how to actually put together a movie. This involved envisioning scenes, making clear decisions on transitions, incorporating a soundtrack, and setting up a narrative that would be both visually and intellectually interesting. Ultimately, we focussed our decisions on the desire to tell the full story as concisely as possible.