Documentary Critical Reflection

"I Wish I Had Your Class For Lunch" was made to show the effects and benefits that music education provides for students with special needs. Music had allowed these students to comunicate and express themselves better than before.

In class documentaries were a major part of the research for both Ryan and I. The documentaries we analyzed in class really benefitted the inclusion of certain techniques and conventions. Ryan told me about the op-doc "Oasis" he had watched, and how he derived a lot of inspiration from it, with some of that inspiration making its way into our documentary through the heavy focus on diegetic sound, or the soft calm tone originating from that. I watched it shortly after and I can definitely see how he drew inspiration. The titles are very similar, as well as the feeling they both give off. Everything felt very raw in both films, but I think our documentary strayed away from the op doc in that case, as it felt more raw.

Our target audience being people with special needs individuals in their lives or around them, wether it be a student, teacher, friend, or complete stranger, meaning all the conventions we chose to follow or not were there fro a reason. Some segments included no interview to put the focus on the students and their exitement, as well as Dr. Laz, the teacher of said students. These decisions helped to emphasize the importance surrounding the impact of music with special needs students.  

The piece was structured in a way that stylized an average day for the special needs students in that music class. This was formulated to be engaging in a sense that it would feel somewhat intimate, which was followed up with the questions asked to Dr. Laz. All of this was done to replicate a feeling of trust that could be felt through the bond between Dr. Laz and his students.

However, there were a few blunders we made. The intro felt out of place due to its voiceover, since it never really appeared after the first time. Also, the animated sequence I had made felt incomplete, and we recieved feedback that it could've been better if we had simply added another nearing the end of the documentary to tie it back together. The overall point is the documentary could've been more spread out, and tweaked to fit the theme and topic a bit better. If we had made these changes, the documentary would've been stronger in the sense of engagement.

Representation is tough in the media. Dominant ideologies usually focus on the disability of a person rather than the person themselves. I viewed an Op-doc called "View From the Floor" that spoke of how the media will prefer to paint a picture of disabled people constantly being under hardship. It ignores any skill, or personality and simply provides the idea that a person is their disablity, and any accomplishment they make is "against all odds".

Our documentary ignores that dominant ideology and represents these special needs students as themselves. People who have personality, who are motivated, and passionate. This is something that is reflected off of the B-roll incorporated, preferring to have diagetic audio and raw footage, showing a more independent person, over something close to an essay. In challenging these ideologies, we get to toss out sympathy and feeling of misfortune, and bring in inclusion and multiple perspectives.

Post production

Okay so during those 2 ish days that I was grounded I was tasked with one thing, to find some uncopyrighted songs on Bensound or Pixabay. Unfortunately, me being extremely stupid and somehow not remembering to expect an assignment like this, I didnt document the exact song I got, and it was deleted rather quickly. However, the process of doing this was mad annoying.

Bensound and Pixabay free music is so bad it makes me wanna rip out my ears.

Dont use these | (just kidding I just hate them) /\

Dude omg i dont have anything to really write for this I mostly just worked on the animation. I was kind of barred from editing since Ryan really wanted the documentary to come out exactly as he picutred it (no hate I lowk respect that but like I didnt have much workload or contributions.)

anyways... since I was grounded I could only really work with my phone, which is fine just slower than normal. The biggest issue I had was with files. I HATE I PHONE FILES APP WHY IS IT LIKE A MAZE. I'd download a song and save it somewhere and then for some reason I have to perform a ritual just to access the folder I just made because apparently it was hidden down there with atlantis. Also looking through music, finding a song that sounded good and then realizing it was paid (on bensound) was super duper tragic (At the time I didnt realize there was a filter paid songs out button).

As always everything worked out 😎

um

okay

bye

Production 1

uhhhhhhhhhhhh sooooooo


By the time I started working on production, Ryan had already filmed basically everything we needed. This meant B-roll, Interviews etc. This was really unfortunate for me since it left us with an unbalanced workload that I didnt really want. Ryan told me that I could contribute to the production with an animation, and aspects of editing. I was kind of bummed out that I wasnt able to make it to the filming because the teacher Ryan interviewed seemed like such a cool person, but it was whatever.



So anyways, onto the animation.........

I hate it so much.



Okay so the thing about this is I dont really have animation experience. I have literally only created very simplistic animations with 0 technique incorporated in the past, with all of them being purely for fun. That meant that I was supposed to create an animation (that was originally supposed to be like minimum 15 seconds long) surrounding Ryan's original idea, with essentially 0 good experience and very little knowledge.

I did it anyways :3

I began with a few test trials, such as the one provided. I personally liked the direction this one was going in, but Ryan felt it didnt really capture his vision, so I moved to a more simple style, which did help speed up the pace of which I could make it.

The day after this attempt, I had a class with a friend who had proper animation experience, so I decided to ask for help with techinique. What I ended up learning was that sometimes making certain slower frames play twice (or atleast a indirect copy with no actual movement) can help create a pace in the animation, compared to just having everything be at the exact same speed. Its like flowy or something idk.

With the final draft nearing, I felt a bit more ready to approach it, so one day I grabbed my laptop, and........



Wait.....


Okay so everything sucks I got sick (just like I am rn typing this!!! :333) and everything got delayed further. I feel like such a slob because I really didnt do much during those like 2-3 days in which I was dying.

Alas, I had to eventually continue, with few days left I panicked and finished a version of the final animation I wished to polish.

I kind of got grounded (I cant do anything right can I) so I really just like couldnt send it or work on it until last minute... yknow... cuz i didnt have my computer...

When I got ungrounded (day it was due I think) I polished up the stuff that bothered me the most and sent it. 

phew! I hate it so much 😁🥹🥺

Research and Planning...

 When I started working with Ryan, I had 0 idea of what to do for our documentary. We sort of went through an entire class of trying to come up with something that could be the foundation of our documentary. What ended up happening was ryan came up with two ideas, one about the people affected by one of his friends being taken by ICE recently, and the other about another friend of his who has autism and plays drums, and a teacher who teaches special education music. We decided on the second topic, originally focusing on the friend of his who played the drums.

We ended up making a rough documentary outline on Ryans friend, who btw is named Jacob. We created a goal for the documentary to correctly document the special connection between autism and music. We also created a list of B-roll we should use. 

This documentary outline was created by the both of us, we finished off that day with a general idea, and ryan attempted contact with his friend. Everything up until this point was going at a decent pace.

what? He's where???? 

You cant ever have one of these projects without SOMETHING going wrong silly! As it turns out, Jacob, our MAIN subject (and possibly only planned one at the time) was in the hospital???? I forgot exactly why, I think he was like really really sick or something. This completely restarted our positioning back to the start, the only lingering thing was the idea to still document the relationship between music and autism.

After a bit of thinking, Ryan told me about how someone in his family goes to a school with a music program for kids with autism, down syndrome etc. and how we may be able to film the teacher as the subject of our documentary. This was a great change honestly, because it increased the overall credibility past a high school student. Honestly, we did need that change from the original topic.

We ended up working together to create a new outline that sort of piggybacked off of the old one (which I unfortunately do not have any access to, since it was on paper and I forgot to take an imagr). The document had meaningful questions to ask the interviewee (teacher), as well as more solid framework. With this new outline, ryan contacted the teacher and decided to leave early one day in order to film the majority of the content (I was kind of left out cuz I literally could not leave early on a B day). So I was told to consider making some animated B-roll, which honestly I dreaded, but took on the challenge and began some light research and consultance (bombarded my animator friend with questions).

“How much of the footage did you help film?”

Documentary Viewing and Research!

 We got our second big project while learning about documentaries! We first watched a few documentaries to take notes on the techniques utilized and also view different stylizations. I would like to say I like how different documentaries can be, before this lesson if you had asked me "What do you think documentaries consist of" I probably would've answered something about generic natural geographic style and applied it to everything. I do know now that documentaries are very fluid and unique.

The very first documentary we watched was an episode from an episodic documentary called Abstract: The Art of Design (2019). The episode we watched in class was about costume design. The episode documented costume designer Ruth Carter. Her background, her career, and what she represents was also documented in this piece. The technique I learned from this documentary was very interesting. For example, because it is an episodic documentary, every episode starts off with an intro and theme song. Though, the intro is different per episode including scenes from popular movies and shows with a focus on the costumes. This piece utilized plenty of B-roll in most scenes, which kept it interesting and focused in a charming way. It was overall a nice documentary (episode), but It really didnt have as much of an impact on me as the other two did 

The next documentary we saw I had the misfortune of not being able to watch fully (I missed the end :cry:). This one was called American Promise (2013). It is a documentary that spans 13 whole years, documenting the producer's son Idris & his best friend Seun living in New York. The boys are attending the Dalton School, a prestigious school. The overall motive of the documentary was to document the pressure placed on students and there was also the documenting of racism and how it was like to grow up in New York in such a presigious school as a black student. The most notable thing from this documentary's technique is how raw and alive it felt. The majority of the documentary was filmed by hand by the parents of Idris and Seun. A lot of the content was completely raw, with real emotion behind it, even the interviews were done rather suddenly, resulting in most of what was being said being 100% honest.

The very last documentary we watched before switching over to Op-docs was Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010). This was also my least favorite, but thats kind of because im biased and dont like Bansky. Anyways, the documentary follows a guy named Thierry Guetta, and Bansky. The documentary began showing how Guetta always loved video taping things, so after a few events he started taping street artists creating their work, shifting focus over to bansky for a bit. The documentary also puts an emphasis on the relationships Guetta made. However, the documentary shifts focus back to Guetta after he attempts to become a street artist without any proper meaning, resulting in controversy and displaying how people make meanings for the stuff they see. The style of the documentary is nice, it features lots of raw camera movements and jump-cuts, the B-roll did make the documentary more interesting, but it just wasnt my thing. I will, however, say that the documentary was a stylized version of rawness (you could equate this to boiled chicken :brokenheart:.

The next thing I watched was an Op-doc called View From the Floor (2025). The Op-doc talks about Mindie Lind, a disabled person with no legs. The overall topic is very interesting, talking about how people utilize disabled people as a source of "inspiration porn", or content one watches to make themselves feel good / better. I liked some of the decisions made, such as making interviews have an animated character to accompany the voice, but to be honest the downsides far outweigh the upsides in this piece. I would've loved this documentary as maybe a podcast or something, but the animation utilized for the entirety of the Op-doc is so damn ugly I straight up just cant be nice about it. I feel like its too oversaturated and it looks too similar to those "ugly adult show" artstyles. On the other hand, I feel like everything being animated didnt really allow for much technique. I view this documentary visually as a "what not to do" piece.

Hi again! Fun post for reviewing Hollow Knight: Silksong (not school related)

Hi dudaroonis! Im taking AICE Media studies A level this year so I'll be back to routine blog posts soon. As for now, I simply wanted to redecorate my blog page as last time the decoration was... something.

Anyways!

I will also be posting here occasionally for fun because im bored and it sounds nice.

On that topic.... I beat Hollow Knight: Silksong 100% guys!

I personally love this game guys, I highly recommend it! (Not enough to say a word during in class recommendations tho [scary!]). This game has super nice visuals, scenery, and a very nice use of particles, all while made in Unity. Aside from the beautiful graphics, the game has smooth, fun gameplay that the average person would find difficult, with fighting styles called "crests" that help the game cater to everyone (The game's difficulty is essentially scaled to a point where the developers expect you to have played the first game Hollow Knight). Also, the controls and movement are super flowy in a satisfying way that really feels acrobatic. Lastly, Hollow Knight: Silksong has around 60-80 hours of content for the average player, which is a lot of playtime especially since it only costs 20 dollars.

I would highly recommend purchasing this game, it is a solid 10/10 game.

That concludes my obsessive rambling on Silksong.

Except it kind of doesnt because i wish to provide a few examples of what im talking about.

This is part of the introduction to the game. I really love how beautiful they made a simple walk be, while still keeping a good pace.

This isnt the best example of the "flowy" combat system the game has, but its the only actual clip I have that isnt a major spoiler to the game. Even though this boss fight isnt the most "flowy", it is still a really enjoyable and smooth.

Now I actually conclude my mediocre game review.

Final Post Including CCR and Finished Film!

 It is that time my fellow cambridgeans        


Final Film
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CFYL7atFIrQbD-BgfeVQvzda54jw2k8N/view?usp=sharing



CCR 1
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14bGzn3UzAAKzBeqk0QOvi-u0nR9uVZ5J/view?usp=sharing

CCR 2
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1naD4svGsM6P_XlfVQgQQzqBUQKXuNqZZ/view?usp=sharing

Please dont put ccr2 in the hall of shame that is the "what not to do" examples I know its awful