FILMMAKING

This all started when a friend reached out to me because she needed help with editing a documentary project about the education system in her village situated in Africa. For her, this was never about making a "top tier film"; instead, it was a project for her fellowship and to spread awareness of an issue, since she is very focused on human rights.

 This was a very unique project because of the language barrier. I speak only English and Spanish, but the documentary is in French and Dagbani. Therefore, this project required a lot of communication between the director and me so that I could always keep up with understanding the interviews and the context of different clips. With the power of Premiere Pro, I managed to generate captions and even make out what people were saying sometimes, so that I could edit certain captions. However, all the captions were refined by the director since she was fluent in those languages.

 After all the captions were dealt with, the editing process started. It was such a beautiful experience to figure out what the story was about as I understood the words more. I tried my best to edit this in a way in which respect and appreciation was shown to everyone involved in this beautiful project. The forefront of this project for me was making it about the kids, the parents, and all the adults who helped, rather than this just being an editing experience.

 And the fact that this project ended with the quote "May God bless this project" just made the whole journey mean so much more. Amen!

This documentary was a film project for a course called "Documentary Filmmaking", where we not only learned some of the fundamentals of filmmaking, but we also learned the principles of how to make (you guessed it) a documentary. 

This project was very distinct and interesting because not only did it require teamwork, but also because we had to brainstorm throughout the whole process since we weren't dealing with a linear script. Most of it came up as we went along with the idea. And even with a script, the pacing kept changing in the editing room. So, it was difficult to guess how the footage of the documentary would pan out. That's why sitting down and talking about ideas with each other as a team allowed us to reach a goal and to come up with solutions more smoothly and satisfyingly. This was the most interesting part of the process for me.

As a group, we had a very tough challenge with the topic of RTP Reviews because more than 60 percent of the documentary is showing visual evidence, but when it came to showing evidence in our footage, we hit a brick wall. Getting actual documents and actual course evaluations responses was nearly impossible. This was because this information was anonymous and confidential to the department. So we had to find different pathways to reach a balance of a limited amount of visual footage and having interviews and b-roll footage. We did our best with the challenge and managed to find a way to balance as much as we could. But it was definitely an amazing experience to try to tackle problems like that together as a group. I love when things like this turn into a thought-provoking puzzle, which to me is the fun part about filmmaking.

 But in general, it was a pretty amazing experience, and we had to do everything here in THREE WEEKS AND A HALF.