A look into para-athletes and disabled athletes.

By: Damien Invictus Tashkara Tumbelaka

My Project

My personal project is a documentary on para-athletes and disabled athletes. I wanted to do this project because of my passion for sports, specifically football,l and learning about para-athletes through my friend who's a disabled athlete, and also through my experiences watching the Paralympics during the 2018 Asian games. Through the documentary, I wanted to raise awareness and spread the achievements that disabled athletes and para-athletes were able to attain and hopefully inspire people and the youth in my community.

To achieve my success I looked at the technical aspect of the video and the performance aspect. For technical, I looked at how good the editing is, whether or not my narration is comprehensible or not, how long the video is and if I was able to send out my message or not. For the performance aspect I looked how many views it got, The minimum amount of views I wanted to get is 150 views, as of 7th April 2022 the video has garnered over 171 views.

The Production

Research and Interviews

for the research, I did independent research on topics that I needed more information on and on how to make a documentary. This stage is how I first started and so I had to make a few questions on what I would research, I decided that I would research more about how to do a documentary and how to interview someone with a mental disability. At first, wanted to do an interview with someone who knows how to do documentaries but I decided that I can do my own research since that would be enough for me to learn, my interview would be my actual project and from there I contacted my possible interviewees.

After researching I summarized all I have learned in the journal. This makes me easier to understand what I have to do for my project

Making the project: Footage and Interview

Before starting anything, I made a list of questions of what I am going to ask my Interviewee, after going back and forth I decided to interview two people, Hadi a SOINA athlete, and Austin, an upcoming professional football player.

One half of my interview was able to speak english and other couldn't I had to translate my questions into Bahasa, in addition to that since Hadi is shy I also had to interview his mother so I had to create more questions specifically for Hadi's mom

Footage

After making the interview questions I Interviewed both Hadi and his mother and then a few days later I interviewed Austin. The interview process was quite long since at first Austin was my only interviewee but due to problems with his agent being uncooperative, I had to find a backup not long after Austin said he is able to do the interview and so my mentor and I decided it would be best to Interview them both.

Making the project: Video Making

Script

After researching and gaining all the needed information and filming all the footage and interviews I had to make a script. The script would include my narrations and an explanation of my topic. I decided that the script would not include everything and that I shouldn't follow everything and I should improvise because that would be better. This is because I felt that putting in a bit of improvisation would improve the video and I wouldn't sound as robotic. My script would also be a small outline of where I put my footage and interviews.

Voiceover/recording.

After I made the script I started doing the voiceovers for the narration and started recording for sections where I had to show my face. This part was pretty hard due to my stutters. Other than the narration I had to record stock footage or record footage from youtube and other places for the footage to show certain parts of my narration what I'm talking about. The stock footage is also a very important part of my video since it becomes a visual representation of what I am talking about during the narration and explanation.

Editing and Publishing the video

After I did the voiceovers and recording I edited the footage, I put all the footage, Interview recordings and stock footage into the places where it fits. The editing process also includes music and me going over all the footage to check whether the audio is good or is it to high or too low. This part is by far the hardest and most grueling part of making the video.

After I edited everything and finishing the video I published the video on youtube after showing my interviews the video for confirmation.

ATL Skills

ATL Skills used

The ATL skills I used are mainly communication and research. I used communication when communicating with my interviewees and my mentor, I used this skill throughout my process since communication is very important for my project because without it I wouldn't be able to contact my interviewees at all.

The other skill I used was used at the beginning of the project which was the research skill, as the name suggests the skill was used during the investigation or the research stage of the project. I used my research skill to research various topics and information that I needed for my documentary.

Reflection of my project

Challenges

I faced numerous challenges during the making of my project, First I faced an internal problem of time management and procrastination, at first it was going well with everything going as scheduled and as planned but as time goes on I started procrastinating and due to that I started having time management problems and it didn't help that one of my interviewee agents were unresponsive and pushed my schedule back and made me fall behind on my timeline.

For external challenges, there were a few, One was that I had a very limited amount of editing experience and so editing would be very grueling and hard for me, other than that there was the aforementioned problem with the agent.

Impact on my community & on myself

Personally, through this project, I was able to understand deeper the journey and struggles of para-athletes and disabled athletes. I was also able to motivate myself and reflect on myself on what to do next by looking at how determined they are about what they want to do.

Community-wise, I feel that my video was able to make people understand the struggles and the journey of these athletes and also how good para-athletes and disabled athletes are.

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