CCR

I am so happy with the way everything turned out1 While we hit some bumps on the road, we figured everything out and managed to make something we're both happy about. Here is my CCR!

Final Documentary!!

Ladies and gentleman, after a lot of hard work and dedication I am more than happy to show you guys the final product! Hannah and I really enjoyed working on this and hope you enjoy it!

Here is the final website:

https://hannahlassner.wixsite.com/mysite

And finally, here's the poster...

Project completion

While we hit a couple of bumps on the road, we have reached the end of our documentary. It involved a lot of hard work and issues that we had to resolve, but both Hannah and I are happy with the end product.

Our biggest issue was of course, Covid-19. We had initially planned to film everything together during Spring Break, obviously, we weren't able to do that. We ended up each filming some shots and joining them to get everything done. However, we didn't end up interviewing all the people we wanted to. The initial plan was to interview some people in our class, but plans had to change. Hannah and I communicated constantly to make sure that we were each doing our jobs and also helping each other out as much as we could.

The end product is something that I could say I am proud of. With the unfortunate limited resources we ended up with due to the incapability of leaving our homes, we found solutions to our problems. We each found things around our houses and ended up making a documentary that we both enjoy. Ultimately, I am proud of the completion of our documentary and cannot wait for the reveal.

Update

We are almost there! we are putting the finishing touches on everything but other than that, we are done! We've been working on this for a long time and we're now reaching the end.

All we have left to do is some final things on editing, but they are minor changes. Therefore, as soon as that is covered i'll show you guys the final product!

Stay tuned for the rest of the blogs this week because the official release of the documentary is very soon!

Get editing done together

Because we can't physically hang out, and have already decided that Hannah will be editing, we're going to be on Facetime again so I get input on the editing process. While she is going to be doing it, I will be on FaceTime with her trying to help in any way that I could, and possibly give her ideas that I may have.

We scheduled that for the beginning of next week, so just come back and I'll tell you all how that went and how the editing process is going.

CCR and b-roll

So even though I did part of my CCR with the discussion, I have to start thinking about that and getting it done. I am going to be looking over at the questions and trying to think of my answers, sooner rather than later.

Anyway, I'm going to tell you guys the b-roll shots I need to get today, so here I'm going to list them just so I have them...

• Sitting down over the shoulder shot
• close up of phone 
• medium shot from front 
• medium from side 

Editing Time!

Ok blog, great news... we finally have (almost) everything filmed. We filmed our interviews and made sure that they're ready for editing.

For the interview I filmed, I grabbed a light that my dad has that produces amazing lighting. The interview looks great, and I think edited it will look even better. The only setback was the usage of my phone to film, due to lack of supplies and availability at the moment. So even though I didn't get to use a great camera due to Coronavirus, I think it still turned out great because of the lighting that I put.

I am going to be filming some b-roll shots around my house revolving around my brother (one of the interviewees) just to make sure we have enough footage.

Anywas, we're in the final part of our project, only a few things left!

Website

So we've been working on our website throughout this week. We had some ideas for it so I think for this blog I'm going to show you guys the ideas that Hannah and I came up with for the website...

1. Sleek and modern, playful, design 
2. try to make it look sort of as a social media platform 
3. have an episodes page in which users would be able to see the episodes 
4. I thought of black color, I think it goes with social media and can also work with the modern look 

Yeah so we have a basic idea fo how we want our website to look, we just haven't finalized it yet. Any ways, this week we will be very efficient and get things done, so please come back and I will keep you guys posted on what's going on!

Family

I'm at home with my two brothers and my parents. With the possibility of going outside to film being nearly impossible, we think we're going to simply interview our family members. I started planning that and tried thinking how that would pan out, so here are my thoughts.

My oldest brother, Franco, is rarely on his phone, and spent most of his day either working or watching Netflix; therefore, I think he can work as a great interviewee. He can talk about how he isn't addicted and how he doesn't even have TikTok downloaded.

On the other hand, my middle brother, Jeronimo (i'm the youngest) LOVES TikTok. In fact, he sends me a minimum of 2-3 tiktoks a day that he thinks are funny. I feel like he'd also make an excellent person not interview because he can relate to the subject. I am excited for this interview, and actually think it can turn out great.

Facetime

So due to obvious reasons, Hannah and I haven't been able to hang out to discuss plans and ideas. Therefore, we've started to Facetime often in order to talk about possible ideas and solutions to our problems. We actually talked for a long time, in which we both discussed our nerves of how all this is going to pan out.

Since we cannot see each other, we're planning on interviewing family members that we can see. She will be interviewing some of her family, while I do the same. Furthermore, Hannah suggested that we could possibly have people interviewed electronically; however, I don't think that it would turn out as great as we want it to.

Obviously, we have a lot to think about, and with not much time left, we might have to go with our plan B and simply interview our family members.

Solitude

With the same issue we've been having still setting us back, we've been looking at possible new solutions.


We talked today and agreed that we might have to end up filming independently. With our parents not allowing us to leave our houses, us hanging out to get things done seems very hard. If we end up doing it alone, we'll just have to manage by communicating and trying to work together virtually. While we think we can get that done effectively, we hope it doesn't have to come to that. Of course, I'll let you guys know whatever we do!

Title!

We have decided on a title for our documentary! This has been something we've been trying to confirm since we started this project, yet hadn't been able to decide. Our title is... (drum roll please)

Obsession

We thought of this title and honestly feel like it's great for our documentary. It is simple, yet explains what our documentary is going to be about.

Furthermore, I went ahead and looked at some possible font ideas for our title, so have a look at some of the options...

 My personal favorite is the middle one, but I still haven't asked Hannah about her opinion, so no official decision has been made yet. However, now that we know our title, we can advance with much more things in our project!

Website

We've started to look into ideas for our website, and we think that we found two template choices that we both like. We haven't decided on which we want yet, but we think that both of these have a more of a modern look that we can have the documentray follow. I personally like the blue option a little more, as I feel that it has a more playful look, while I feel like the white one looks a little bit more as if it were a news page or more of a blog. However, because we haven't 100% agreed to one, the decision hasn't been made yet, but I'll let you guys know if that changes.

Here are the two options:

Editing

While we're still not editing, we've been talking about when we do. We decided that Hannah is going to edit as she has more experience editing and thinks she can do a good job. Of course I'll be helping her do that but she is going to be the main editor. She will be using final cut pro to do her editing, so we believe that the editing can be done very well.

Trouble

While we've been trying to stay as productive as possible, the quarantine situation is really limiting what we can do. We had planned to have our things filmed by now, yet with what's currently going on we have no idea when we're going to finally be able to film. However, whenever we'll be able to film we'll have a limited time of editing. Unfortunately we have to go through this, so all we can do is try to keep communicating and hope for the best.

We have everything ready, we just need that green light to be able to film. Hopefully this all ends soon and we're back to normal.

Updates

Hey blog! We've been a little worried with our filming, and don't really know what is going to happen. Our plans to record during Spring Break is going to be very difficult now due to the Coronavirus. We are hopeful that we will be able to still film during our scheduled time, but we need people for interviews, and at this stage it's very hard to fund people that are still willing to get interviewed. 

We're both simply just hoping that we'll be able to record and not fall behind, because that would just complicate everything. In my class group chat we've been all talking about the problems that are surfacing, and we all feel that if the Corona Virus continues to disturb our filming, we may have to look at alternatives. 

Episode

So I was a little confused on what was meant by this being a simple episode to our documentary series. Hannah explained it to me however which was really helpful. Our documentary is about social media addiction, and this certain episode that we are doing is on TikTok. I had been confused on that before, so finding that out and finally understating that was actually very helpful. We've been looking at some key art for inspiration, and this is the best that we could find...

FIRST Interview!

Hannah and I were talking in class about the people we'd like to interview, and that list included people in their later 20s and up. I messaged a lot of Tiktokers in that age range in the hopes that some of them would answer, and one answered! The only negative thing is that the person responded as a message, and has not sent us the video yet, but he said he would soon. Here is what he sent us in reply to our questions.

"Why did you download tik tok in the first place? Because I saw PewDiePie make videos about it

If you had to guess, how many hours a day do you spend on TikTok?
I think I average 2

Do you post anything on TikTok, if so, why?
I do and because I feel I bring value to a lot of people in the running community

How many times do you check tik tok a day?
Too often

Does your “for you page” relate to your personality? How
I tend to get a lot of stupid 'vine energy' type videos and people doing tricks which is pretty me

Do you follow users that you are interested in? And if so do you regularly check on their profiles?
Yes and I don't regularly check their profiles

Would you call yourself addicted to this app?
Probably"

Hopefully he'll send us the video soon and then we can see from there!

Spring break!

Spring Break is very close, and we think that it could be perfect for filming. Since both Hannah and I are staying home and not going anywhere over break, we think that we should start and finish filming everything in that break. If we are able to do so, which we should, it would give us plenty of much needed editing time.

Now that we know the specifics of our documentary, we feel that we know what we are prepared to get everything filmed on Spring Break.

I know this was more of a short post, I just wanted to let you guys know that we officially have our filming dates set!

TikTok

I've been doing reproach on TikTok, and this is some information that I think is important and could help our case.

• About 800 million monthly users 
• Over 1.5 billion app downloads 
• 20 million users in November in the United States 
• Average of 52 minutes per day on the app 
• open app around 8 times a day

At the class seminar they told us that we had to have a certain stance on our documentary. Therefore, we chose that we should make social media addiction as bad and real as it is. We want our documentary to show the real danger that exists. Hannah and I agreed that we can use all the information we have been finding to show the dangers of social media addiction, and how things must be done in order to fix them. 

We've been working on a schedule, and we have agreed on days that work for both of us, I'll let you guys know all about it in the next post. 

TikTok?

As I mentioned in the previous post, the seminar gave us a lot of new ideas. One of the things we were told is that we should really be specific to one topic, instead of broadly doing social media. We therefore thought about TikTok, as it is one of the most famous social media sites at the moment. TikTok has it set up so that if a user is on for a long time, they are warned that they should get off the site. The only way I could get some examples on were with the links, so here is two videos telling users tp get off the app...

https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1227602219681357824?s=20

https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1227602887695568896?s=20

I found all this to be very interesting, and had never even heard about it before the seminar. Anyway, I think that we can use this information to our advantage, as we can talk about steps that TikTok has taken in order to battle social media addiction. Furthermore, we can interview people and ask them about this, and about their opinions on this. With all this information, we know that we want to do TikTok, because it is simply so popular at the moment that we think it can be the most relatable and relevant.

Class Seminar

So we had a seminar in class in which Hannah and I were given the chance to tell everyone our plans, and everyone told us what they thought. It gave us a lot to think about and made us realize that we hadn't been thinking about man factors. Here are the notes I took in class...

Does instagram allow you to express yourself?

Mental health around generation Z 

Question connection 

Think about episodes - mini topics 

alliteration - communication

Individually throughout episodes

Tiktok makes you addicted 

Talk About ego- trying to prove themselves through social media 

“In this virtual world where we’re all connected, why do we feel so alone?”

Watch Look up video 

Define the theme- informational, biased, for or against 

BBC DOCUMENTARIES ON YOUTUBE- NEUTRAL 

CNBC financial documentaries- critical towards their topic

Michael Moore documentary- biased 

Designs of social media 

Articles about different social medias 

Tiktok tells you to get off the app after a while of usage 

How much people dislike the people they make famous- Charli Damelio 

You're not worth my time, yet im taking my time to watch you 

Jake and Logan Paul 

Talk about creators that have had to delete their apps 

The more specific the better 

Obviously this seems like a lot of random information, but it actually all ties back to our idea, so we will definitely be looking into all of this.

Scheduling

Even though we have a lot of time to create our documentary, we want to make sure that we do not leave anything for the last minute. We want to make sure that by the due date everything is excellent. Therefore, we have already started to look at possible people we can interview. One of those being Mrs. Lorie, who has her students bring their phones to the front of the room. We want to ask her things like why she does that and if it proves to be helpful.

Furthermore, another interview will be some teenagers that spend long times on social media. We can have them show us their daily usage on settings, allowing us to see their daily hours spent on both their phone and on social media. Here is an example of how that looks...

 Showing a couple of these will allow us to show the magnitude of the issue, and how even some people that do not know they are addicted, are in fact addicted.

For example, we can have some interviews with people that think they are not addicting, then we ask them to show us this screen, which says otherwise.

Generation Z

I've been doing a lot of research on social media addiction, and the results did not surprise me. As we had thought, Generation Z is the generation with the most social media usage.
The first generation to grow up with the constant usage of social media. 
"Generation Z spends an average of 3 hours 38 minutes online on smartphones, almost 50 minutes longer than the average Intern user." It is a generation that has grown up with technology constantly around them. Furthermore, I found this in an article that I found to be very interesting...
"Research has shown that there is an undeniable link between social media use, negative mental health, and low self-esteem. While social media platforms have their benefits, using them too frequently can make people feel increasingly unhappy and isolated."

So because we know that there are extremely negative correlations between social media addiction and depression, we can talk about this in our documentary. We can sort of introduce it as it is, and explain the negative factors that come with it. 

Furthermore, I found the websites most commonly used by this generation...

1. Youtube
2. Gmail
3. Snapchat
4. Instagram 
5. Facebook

This is helpful information that we can discuss in our documentary, explaining the gravity of the issue. 

Topic Decision!

Hannah and I have been constantly brainstorming, and have finally come to a decision on our topic. The topic we ended up agreeing on is… Social media addiction! 

We believe that this is a very relevant issue that we can bring to life in our documentary. Being part of a generation that has grown up with social media usage, we have seen this addiction firsthand, allowing us to know what we should mainly focus on. We have planned some of our potential interviews, and think that we can interview three different groups of people: parents, teenagers, and teachers who have to withstand the students with their addictions. By interviewing parents, it will show how prominent the issue is, and how many people are going through it. With teachers we will be able to show how the addiction carries on in many different scenarios, not just at home. And finally, we’ll show the addicted person’s P.O.V and opinions. 

I found a documentary released in 2019 that talks about the dangers of social media. I haven’t been able to watch the whole documentary, but I saw the key art and got a sense of what this documentary goes for.  

So as you can see, this key art focuses on black and white colors, with the danger of social media being the main theme. Because we are doing social media addiction, we can get some inspiration from this documentary by looking at their color shading. We can get ideas for possible editing techniques that will maximize the effectiveness of our documentary. 

I'm going to be doing some more research on social media addiction, so stay tuned to to the next post as it will be specifically about social media addiction and the effects that come with it.

Interview Research

This post is mainly about interviews, and what can be done to make them look as clean as possible. The first and crucial thing, is that the subject does not look at the camera, and instead looks to the side of the camera. This makes it seem much more realistic, not staged.

The rule of thirds is also something that I want to make sure we use. Not centering the subject in the interview is going to make the shot look much more aesthetically pleasing. Here is an example of a documentary I found online, that has the subject placed in just the right place.

If we use interviews like this, it makes the background of the shot relevant, giving us more creative space. For example, if we use a simple shot with the subject in the middle, it consumes our whole shot. However, with the subject on the side, we are allowed the chance to put things in the background, adding to the mise-en-scene of our piece.





Finally, I wanted to show another thing that I found from an interview. This interview uses the rule of thirds, yet blurs out the background. While I don't want to use it in all cases, I feel like using it in an extremely important interview is not a bad idea. Here is how it would look...

This adds relevance to the subject, making what they have to say that much more important.

Research

So I've been doing research on documentaries, and have especially been reliant on notes I took earlier in the year. My notes were extensive, so they have been very helpful.  What I have learned for conventions for example, is that if I want to give off a sense of extreme realism, hand held camera would not be a bad idea. Hannah and I talked about this, and said that if we can manage to pull a shot like that off, it would look great for our documentary. As I had previously mentioned in my last post, we also agreed on indirect interviews.

What I have been really thinking about however is selective editing. I know how important editing is going to be for our final product, and I think that sounds and colors are really going to come into place here. We want to follow the tone of our documentary with the color saturation of the video. We also found crosscutting from one scene to another to be a good idea.

So what I can conclude from all of this research on my notes is the importance of good editing. we have to follow our tone throughout the editing process, and while that may be very difficult, we understand that it will make the final product that much better.

Documentary!

 I'm more than excited to be announcing my final project: I will be creating a documentary with Hannah Lassner. We were deciding between a music video or a documentary, but we decided that a documentary has more potential. We are starting to decide upon what we want to have our documentary revolve around, yet have not made a final decision yet. The first idea we had was a documentary on adolescents who coach recreational sports, but we did not officially decide on that. What we both agreed is on is that we would have indirect interviews in our documentary, and not direct interviews. We believe that this will give our documentary a more clean look.
Some of our other ideas include:

1. Youth sports coach
2. Student athlete 
3. High school students who have jobs 
4. Addictions
5. College application process 
6. Social media usage with teens 
7. Vaping 
8. immigrants
9. Kids raised in single parent households 
10. Teachers 

Even though we have not decided on a definitive documentary, we think that it may come out from one of these. I will be updating my blog with any new updates regarding our documentary, so stay tuned!

Marketing Campaign Reflection

      A couple of weeks ago, my classmates and I were introduced to the idea of a marketing campaign, and were later on given the option to decide on doing one for Wonder Paws or for the Census. As soon as my group and I heard the options, we were instantly hooked with the idea of creating our marketing plan for Wonder Paws. We conducted research with the fact that we looked into everything regarding Wonder Paws, from what was going right to what they could have been doing differently.

     My group members and I decided on the heavy usage of social media, and the implementation of TikTok. We believed that this would be an innovative idea that had a great potential. We met together a couple pf times to perfect our strategies and discuss new ideas. Overall, we believe that we did a very good job and that we raised some very good ideas for Wonder Paws.

     I will use this project as a preparation for the portfolio project. Having a schedule was crucial because If not, we would not have been able to get everything done. And I think that this will be crucial for the upcoming project as I must prepare my time perfectly and not leave things unplanned or for the wrong time. By using my experience with the marketing project, I believe it can help my portfolio project's final success.

Transition Into a New Year

     Welcome back! I just want to say I'm more than excited to be here once again! This year I am taking Aice Media A level, and no longer AS level. I have been furthering my knowledge in the media field and am ready to start my new project. I will keep you all updated on everything along the process, so stay tuned for more to come!