Second Semester Seniors (A Break Out Room Production)

Because everyone in A Level media studies is a second semester senior at this point it was nice to talk with other people who are going through the same things you are. It was cool to see people passionate about their projects but at the same time bemoaning the difficulties of other classes like math.

 We recently met with other students in our media studies class in order to help each other and offer advice on each other's respective projects. It was cool to see the mix of projects people were attempting. We started the meeting by briefly explaining what our production ideas were for our project, and it was clear that some people were further along than others in terms of how fleshed out their ideas were for their project. My group did not really have any major issues that we discussed because we were all fairly comfortable with where we were at in our productions. Some of the advice I was offered included: broadening the subjects of the documentary to include as many groups as possible. I really liked this suggestion even though the production was leaning that way anyways, to have someone else verbalize something you weren't confident in was very reassuring. Someone else suggested localizing the production to Florida and interviewing local indigenous tribes about their culture. While this was a cool idea I think it is too hard for us to execute because we do not know anyone we could interview and getting ample subjects would be difficult. 

A Little Research Music

 'Little Shop of Horrors' is one of my favorite broadway shows so I couldn't help myself with this reference to 'A Little Dental Music' from that musical. But that's not what this post is about, in this post I'm going to discuss some of the research I have done so far after speaking with my teacher about the project last class. 

I watched one episode of the docuseries 'The Toys That Made Us' on Netflix. This series is interesting because of the way they did the episode breakdown. By focusing on one toy each episode it allows the production to continue for as many seasons as it wants, it gives the concept longevity instead of limiting it. The episode I watched was about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and it was interesting to see the mix of archive and new footage. The episode was on the longer side, about 45 minutes and I definitely found myself losing interest in certain parts of the piece. This showed me that for our target audience we really need to follow the advice of keeping the episodes short. I also would have liked to see more visuals, for example they spoke about the insane sales for the TMNT toys after an episode would air and it would have been nice to show that frenzy in graph format or something along those line. 

I also looked into the Instagram page of the documentary film 'Meru' to get a better idea of what our social media page should look like. The page included a lot of shots from the production as well as photos of celebrities with the directors. It seems like the Instagram was used to tease the different scenes of the documentary by showing a few different mountain climbing shots. This tells me that even though we are only filming an excerpt of one episode maybe we should create a still image or staged "shot" to embody each episode and post that on our social media page. 

We Need To Talk

 Today in class Shreya really wanted to speak with our teacher to discuss our ideas and ask for help because we were struggling with figuring out how to research our ideas. Since our topic is kind of unique, searching for appropriate information that could inform any creative decisions we make has been hard. Initially I was hesitant to speak with our teacher because I wasn't sure we were prepared enough to speak with her in terms of having a fleshed out production plan (what to do for the excerpt, what to do for the social media etc.) However, after the meeting I realized that Shreya definitely made the right call because meeting with our teacher actually helped us make decisions and quelled the fears I had about not being prepared. 

We got a ton of helpful advice so I want to run through specifics in this post so in future when we are working on the project I can refer to this post for help. Our teacher recommended formatting the episodes as shorter like 20-25 minute episodes to better suit our target audience, generation z because they have short attention spans. For the same reason she suggested including a wide variety of images and media in the production to keep the audience engaged. In terms of research she advised us to check out some docs on Netflix/Prime Video and their corresponding social media pages to get a better idea of what ours should look like. 

And Now It's Time For A Breakdown

For some reason when I began thinking about how to organize the different episodes of the docuseries Shreya and I are creating an excerpt for, this snippet of My Lovin' by En Vogue just kept replaying over and over in my mind. So like that song lyric and the title of this posting, I'm going to do a breakdown. 

Obviously there are various ways and methods of how to divide a documentary into episodes especially with a topic that is so broad like ours. Culture is a behemoth topic so narrowing the focus of each episode is essential to creating a cohesive direction so that the production doesn't feel like the same essential information is being regurgitated every episode. That is one reason why we wanted to have our topic be specifically about maintaining a cultural identity without actively living in that specific community. One idea that I came up with is to view maintaining culture through a distinct lens for each episode.

 For example, one episode would be about technology and in this episode we would delve into how people use social media to connect with family living in a different country or how WhatsApp/FaceTime enables connections that otherwise wouldn't be as possible or occur with such ease.  Other episodes could be about music or media, and another one could be about food. Shreya liked this idea too and we will talk with our teacher to see if this idea is a good approach to the project. 

Tentative Schedule

 Shreya and I wanted to make a schedule in order to stay organized and hold ourselves accountable for project progression. This rough draft of a schedule is similar to the one our teacher made for us, but we have tweaked it a little bit to better suit our needs. Honestly Shreya and I are both usually procrastinators but when it comes to media studies projects it is much wiser to finish filming as quickly as possible to start the editing process as early as you possibly can. Shreya and I both have rudimentary editing skills and switching our main editing software this year has taken some getting used to. Although we are somewhat proficient in imovie as it is kind of self explanatory we are still rusty with it after becoming accustomed to WeVideo. Anyways, this schedule should match up with the topic of my blog posts moving forward, but obviously this schedule is subject to change at any time depending on how smoothly everything goes. :)

Week 1: Ends on 20th

Genre

1 idea each for 5 min

ex. of idea

Schedule

Week 2:

• Research culture education 

• Target audience research 

• Who we want to reach (Gen Z)  and why (most multicultural generation)

• Which theme should first episode be

Week 3:

• Start fleshing out title 

• Production specifics (how many episodes etc.)

• Social media page

• Decide on how to start the excerpt specifically

Week 4:

• interviews

• start B roll 

• Finish filming

Week 5

• Film if needed

• Start Editing

• Plan/Finish magazine article

• Start ccr planning 

Week 6

• Finish editing

• Finish Magazine article

• Research for CCR

• Start CCR

Week 7

• Continue critical reflection

• Research for reflection

Week 8

• Finish critical reflection

Colin and Shreya in the Moooorrnnning!!!!

 Hello everyone, we are back at it again! (and yes that was a Community reference, I binged the first three seasons these past few weeks). Yes the resuming of this blog means that we are beginning our portfolio project for A Level media studies. Shreya and I decided to work together again because if something's not broken why fix it? This partnership has proven pretty fruitful in the past and working on previous projects produced a strong bond between us (wow that was a lot of unintentional alliteration, but I am kind of here for it). 

This time we are creating a documentary series excerpt. There are several components but we are confident that we can do the social media and magazine article pieces well, however as always we are slightly nervous about the filming of the documentary itself. Since it is a series and not a short doc we have to decide how many episodes and how to begin the excerpt. Our tentative idea is doing something with culture because both Shreya and I come from families who are maintaining a semblance of culture while also merging with American values/society. It is going to be a fun and maybe but hopefully not too stressful ride and I hope you all enjoy seeing this close up process.