Documentary post 4

After having formed our final idea, our efforts are now shifted towards planning where we will film and the people we will interview. We got a good start by filming my high school team, youth teams, and young children with their parents playing pond hockey at Lake Nokomis last week. We have a few more ideas about places to go to film and the types of shots we need. As far as interviews go, Bradley has a connection with the founder of the U.S Pond Hockey Tournament, who would likely serve as a great voice throughout our video. We still have to contact him and attempt to find a few other people to interview as well. The difficulty of our topic is trying to think of a way our video can capture the emotion of the viewer. We are leaning towards the bond it creates for people of all ages, but we haven't finalized this aspect.
The reading gave me good insight on the process of interviewing. I learned more about the location of interviews and what factors to take into account to get intimate and individual responses from the interviewee. I also learned good techniques for interviewing like writing questions on an index card and leaving it on your knee in case you need to use it when your mind goes blank. The idea that I feel applies the most to students in our class is when you interview, actually listen to what the person has to say and reflect on their thoughts and emotions instead of reading each question after the next.

Documentary Post 3

We have now reduced our ideas to one simple subject: Pond Hockey in Minnesota. After pitching we were told that our idea was too vague and that it would be hard to make a 5 minute documentary on hockey in Minnesota. After getting a camera and filming my team play outdoor hockey at Lake Nokomis, we all agreed that Pond Hockey would be an interesting and much more concrete idea for our documentary. We are still looking for the one or two people to interview that have personalities fit for our topic.
The Digging Deep section of the reading was the most important one to me.  The four types of research material they brought up made me really try to relate it to my own project. The 'Top', 'Heart', 'Root', and 'Branches' they mentioned are in our case the facts, emotions, history, and related issues of Pond Hockey in Minnesota. This reading will serve as a guideline to how I research and find what is truly necessary for our video.

Documentary Blog 2

We are close to forming our final idea for our documentary. We want to show Minnesota's passion for hockey using the Minnesota Wild, youth teams, and coaches of all levels. Our goal this weekend is to contact the Wild and see if we can get access to interview coaches, players, and other personnel. If we cannot get access, we will most likely focus entirely on hockey teams and coaches up to high school. People we know when get interviews from are my high school coach Shawn Reid and Simon's dad Martin Wolfe.
I learned several intriguing things from the reading. One, that Mark Zuckerberg had a steady girlfriend for most of the period covered by The Social Network, meaning that the movie twisted real life events more than I had known. Also, I learned that images from the Holocaust had been "passed through the machinery of ideological illusion making". This made me question even more the authenticity of propaganda. The passage as a whole enlightened me on the transformation of documentaries over time and how many are starting to skew real life events for the sole purpose of entertaining an audience.

Documentary post 1

Our group is trying to narrow down our ideas for a documentary. We are planning on making one that has to do with hockey in Minnesota and show how Minnesota is the "State of Hockey". The trouble we are having is deciding if we want to focus on the professional level of hockey in Minnesota or more on the youth levels that build up to the pros. Also, we don't know if our topic fits into the category of a social issue that is required in the guidelines. I feel if we get a concrete idea we can make a very good documentary on this subject.
When reading the introduction, the sentence that stood out to me the most was:
"But documentary reflects the richness and ambiguity of the whole of life, and this takes it beyond objective observation". This statement gave me a whole new outlook on documentaries, that your idea needs to apply to the whole picture of life as well as the social issues that make up this life. It was also interesting to me how the author says documentary is wrongly labeled because practitioners disguise their biases. The label the author is talking about is thinking that documentary is objective.