MadisonBlakeHawkenProjects2021

  Our documentary is finalized and we are now just waiting for it to export off of Rishita’s computer and into our presentation submission area. The film is about 9 and a half minutes and it looks almost exactly like we thought it would. The way in which it is different is we have no interviews of an older generation. It kind of worked out for the better though as having the interviews be solely kids made our coming of age film more “coming of age.”  Something that has been a tad annoying on this film is the process of exportation. It takes about an hour for the film to upload and sometimes things go wrong so we have to start over. However, it definitely has had us work on our patience! Right now we are creating google slides for our presentation tomorrow at 3. There are 3 other presenters in our room and I am excited to see what they accomplished over the past three weeks as well. We are keeping our presentation short as it cannot be more than 10 minutes and our film is alrea...

  For the past couple days, we have been going to Rishita’s house to work on the documentary. We like to go to her house because she has the same computers/ computer set up as the Cleveland Film Factory did. It is very easy to work on the larger computers as we rotate chairs every so often to switch off who is editing/ finding other footage/ writing the script. We are in a good routine now as we are getting better with Premier yet still are a tad slow with it.    We have a lot more release forms now so it is easier to add in interviews without being so worried and it is nice to actually have people willing and excited to participate and be involved. Making this is taking more time than we thought but it is still coming together at a reasonable pace for first-timer editors. It is fun to be at her house and working together as we are able to balance fun/work time well and get things done. Normally we meet from 9-2 or 10-3.  Some advice I would give to future Hawke...

Today Rishita Lena and I went to our mentors’ studio in downtown Cleveland. We were there all day and learned a lot about the professionalization of a documentary. We also did a lot of our work on their big computers and were able to actually start to piece together our interviews. We do not have all of the consent release forms yet but are putting together the ones we have so far and double emailing people whose we need to be turned in. Going to the Cleveland Film Factory today was very interesting as it had a very modern and artsy vibe to it. They are still in the beginning of their factory being developed but so far is a very fun place to work in. The picture below is what their outside looked like by their front door. Cool art like this was found everywhere inside as well and there was always something to look at and observe.  They also showed us their past work and what they are currently working on. They showed us how they made their welcome video for Hawken and how they are ...

  Throughout this week we have started to gather our information and film and piece it together slowly into a working final documentary. We each downloaded Premier and are good with the skills that it takes to use it. We additionally have started to use “envato elements” which is basically a film platform with stock videos that we can use without copyright. We can do this because everything on it is public domain. We are in the works of our outline on the documentary and have figured out what voiceovers/ music type we want to put over our script that we have written out as well. We are still in the works of getting every minor media release form from their parents to agree to let their kids interview in the video. This has proven to be one of the most challenging aspects of our project so far. However, even if we are not able to gather all of the release forms we still have a broad array to choose from students' parents who have signed and already turned back to us. We had a meetin...

  We have now gotten interviews from high school students and adults. These interviews were, as we expected, much different than the 8th and 5th graders though. Their thoughts were much more intellectual and interesting with a lot more passion in them - especially when they talked about activism. This probably was because they have simply had more experience with it and have been to places with activism. So far each of us (Rishita myself and Lena) has gotten good with the basics of Premier, the video app we are going to put our documentary on, and are excited to finalize our interviewee's videos and piece it with new information we are going to find this week. We are going to find/ have been searching for/ video pieces of protests (old and new) that deal with feminism and our past presidents. We also want to include speeches from our generation and older generations to show the differences and compare them with the generation gaps from our interviews. Something that has surprised m...

  blog post 1 (friday): Throughout Wednesday my group and I created a game plan on who we were going to interview and how we were going to lay out our documentary. We decided we would go interview the 5th graders at Hawken middle school Thursday then go interview high school students Friday. These are the questions we asked.    What's your name? How old are you? Who was the most controversial president of your lifetime? Do you consider yourself an activist? If yes, do you think you would still be as politically active if not for ____'s presidency? Why? If no, what do you think it would take for you to become an activist? What does feminism mean to you? Are you a feminist?   In asking these questions we noticed that the 11 year olds did not really understand some of the words we were using. Some they did not understand were “controversial,” “activist,” and “feminism.” When they became confused we kindly and easily explained it to them. In total, we interviewed about 1...