After meeting with my mentor, I uploaded a trimmed audio file of our conversation. Then I immediately made the changes to the documentary to get the final version complete. The main changes I made included smoother transitions and less harsh cutting, more audio balancing, rerecording my narration, elongating the time of some of the pie charts, shortening silent gaps, and adding music at the end. The final time is 14 minutes and 53 seconds, slightly shorter than the previous one due to the tightening of the pacing. Overall, I think it came out pretty good. Obviously if I had more time there would be a lot more I could do, but I’m happy.

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Just yesterday I met through a google meet with my mentor, Mark Ingram. Mark Ingram works at Spectrum in Newtown and has a degree in videography. I previously worked with him on the show Sports Grind which I was a producer on. He really enjoyed the documentary and didn’t see any glaring issues. He thought that the message and mood I tried to convey came across clearly. As for the issues, they were all technical ones which he believed would elevate the video a bit more if fixed. He said that I should balance the volume and attempt to clean up the audio as well as make some of the transitions a bit smoother. He suggested that music isn’t necessary but may work to establish mood if used at the beginning and end.

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I finally completed the draft of the documentary, and I am fairly happy with how it turned out. It has a final running time of exactly 15 minutes, which was what I estimated a couple days ago. I organized the documentary in a chronological fashion, starting with the spring of 2020 and ending with where we are now. I was hoping to convey the message that as a school we persevered and we took back our education from the hands of the pandemic. I also tried to convey that while it seems like the worst is behind us, the fact that the pandemic happened in the first place shows that it may happen again, and we should use our experiences to better prepare for if in the off chance we do face something similar.

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I have gotten a good portion through the editing of the draft of the documentary, and I have to say I am pleased by the way it is turning out. The day prior, I went to the school and shot some b-roll of the locations to use when there is no video to use, and it works well mixed with the interviews. I have an opening which I think is creative enough. However, it is being organized slightly differently than I was expecting, and will most definitely end up shorter than I thought, probably around 15 minutes. The only thing I am not so happy with is the voiceover narration I am doing. I will definitely change this in the future, though I am not sure if it will still be my voice.

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Finally, all of the interviews have been completed. I have already shrunken down the videos significantly by putting them into Premiere and cutting out all of the fluff and filler as well as the silence and any answers that I don’t think I could use. This was especially helpful with the longer student interviews which were saved in 35 minute long videos, which aren’t only huge files, but are also a pain to scroll through. Now, the longest video is 15 minutes, but most of them are under 10.

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Only one more interview left to film, and editing will start shortly. My staff survey received 46 responses which I translated into a document which analyzed the results. I was pleased with the results that I received, and am feeling more confident about the project. I look forward to seeing how it turns out as editing begins.

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The deadline is coming up over the horizon, and my interviews are almost complete. I have 2 more teacher interviews to conduct which will be completed early next week. Our applications will also be completed tomorrow. One thing I really need to touch up on is my website, but I’ll do that after I have a reasonably acceptable framework of a documentary. I also began receiving responses from the survey I sent out to the staff. I will wait a couple of days before I translate the information onto a document like I did with the student survey.

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With just a week remaining until we apply for Expo, I have been forming a more concrete frame of the documentary in my mind, and within the next week I will gather the necessary b-roll. I have als finished the staff survey that will be sent out shortly. I did another interview with one of the teacher’s recently, but I hit a roadblock when I reviewed the footage, and realised that only the first minute was legible, while the rest had unintelligible audio. I have no idea why this happened, and the other footage from the other interviews are fine.

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Another successful interview completed, and the remaining few to be completed by next week. I have begun gathering some B-Roll clips from YouTube and forming an exoskeleton of the documentary. A lot of my time has been spent on my Eagle Project which is finally being completed, so I’ve had less time to work on this than I would have liked. I’m not sure how it’s going to turn out, but I have high hopes.

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With being contact traced once again, plans had to change, so I decided to spend my at-home time conducting interviews remotely and screen recording the conversations. By the time of writing this, I have done 3 interviews (2 students and 1 teacher) and will complete another student interview within a few hours. I think the gravity of the lack of time I have has finally caught up with me over the past week, so I have been spending a lot of my free time reflecting on what I have done and will have to get done. I’m looking forward to seeing how this will turn out.

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Over these past few weeks, I’ve been dividing up my Capstone project work with my upcoming Eagle project work, and have attempted to balance my time well enough that I don’t fall behind in either of them. My survey was sent out to the students, and by this day I have received 128 responses. I copied all of the survey responses onto a google document. For the open-ended questions, I divided up the answers into the categories that are most popular. I will be filming multiple student interviews tonight as well.

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I have mostly been working on ideating what I want the documentary to look like. At this stage, it is quite difficult to fully picture it without the necessary information, mainly the interviews and the survey, which the documentary is built around. I have begun writing a list of questions that I will be asking the people that I wish to interview, and the longer I ideate, the more complete it becomes in my head.

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Recently, I’ve been putting together rough lists of what I want the documentary to have, mostly consisting of small bits that make up a basic timeline. I have a good enough series of events but I have been trying to flesh them out. Simultaneously, I have created the survey I will be sending out to the school. I did multiple drafts but finally settled on a final one which will be sent out by the end of the month. Mentor contact has also been commenced.

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After populating the Launchpad with the necessary ingredients, I diverted my attention to my online presence. I started by creating an email address and YouTube account as well as an Instagram to post updates. But my main focus was in the creation of a website, using the ol' reliable; Wix. A half hour of hair pulling later, the website was set up and ready to be occupied. I decided on a color pallet of oranges, reds, blues, and dark shades. I used said color pallet to design the non complicated but in my opinion visually appealing base website.

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Attachments

Once the idea floated to the front of my head, I realized just how much work would be needed to achieve this, but I felt confident. The next several weeks of the process were spent in the branding phase, creating a visually appealing logo accompanied by a catchy name and slogan. I then finished the working document and started the research outline, where I listed out the base series of events that will be featured in the documentary.

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One thing I’ve noticed since Judgement Day (March 13) was that motivation to do anything besides breathing was at an all time low. So when school was remotely reopened a few weeks later, students were not at their best. The chaos, the confusion, the uncertainty, and the isolation brought the school year to a halt. When we started back up this fall with the hybrid schedule and our Capstone classes commenced, I couldn’t even get a project idea in my head. The first couple of months went by, and my peers left ideation in favor of early development. Then it came to me. I should play to my strengths, and I would like to believe that my area of expertise is in the film category, so I came up with the idea to produce a documentary that explores the abusive relationship of Covid-19 and the American Educational System.

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