The purpose of our documentary "Winterguard: The Floor is Our Home" is to explain what winter guard is, how it works, and creates community. I this purpose was met successfully, but there are still a lot of areas where we can improve in, especially technically.
✴How does your product represent social groups/issues?
Our documentary represents high school students involved in Winter Guard, specifically our schools program. We especially just wanted to shed light on a truly underrated sport that individuals pour a lot of their free time and hard work into. Its not the simplest to explain, so creating this piece felt like giving winterguard a spot on the stage to shine and be appreciated. A part from being informative , it addresses personal growth and the feeling of belonging and connecting. We chose to also focus more on how community is the core of the sport by showing how it brings people together, and implying it in the title. The documentary definitely showcases a safe space where anyone can feel included. We made sure to include a wide variety of members for this reason.
✴How does your product engage with audiences?
We used a handful of different techniques in our documentary to keep it as engaging as possible. We establish and try to pique the viewers curiosity straight away with the intro. The upbeat music and quick cuts are an attempt to draw the person in. It also gives them somewhat of a visual of what the documentary is about so they aren't utterly lost. From the start we wanted it to be very interview heavy. Since winterguard has many little aspects to it, it felt wrong to narrow it down to one person, or just the leadership team. We wanted to get everyone's perspectives in. The constant switching, back and forths, and transitions between the different interviewees helped us achieve a very engaging pace (especially for those with shorter attention spans). Every interviewee also had their own designated background, which is not only visually appealing, it adds diversity.
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| Matching b roll |
A part from interviews we also had b roll, which we matched as much as possible to what the interviewee was speaking on. For example, when they talk about competing the b roll is footage of trophies, or archived footage of a past competition performance. The mix filmed and archived b roll just overall gave a viewer a visual pointer to what was being spoken on.
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| Archived footage |
✴How did research inform your product and the way it uses or challenges conventions?
For this piece, research was not necessary as both Kenna and are in/have been in winterguard, and we fully understand what it is and how it works. The challenging part was making the documentary easy to comprehend. And also just creating a documentary in general. Neither of us have ever created a project like this before. Guard is unique and is a very specific "niche" so it was a struggle at first to make it make sense. Because of this we spent a lot of time in pre production going back and forth on the structure, and finding the best methods to get the responses we wanted. This is the kind of documentary topic where everything had to be structured before hand, since its a very black and white topic (its not a theoretical concept or opinionated). We also quickly realized the importance of the questions we asked and how we asked them.
I would say we were inspired by all of the documentaries we studied in class. I really cant pin point one specifically. For example "Abstract" had a lot of staged b-roll, and we used that same technique for a lot of b roll. For example, in our intro, when the person puts their gloves on.
We also took inspiration from "Exit Through the Gift Shop" when it came to the interview shots. In the piece viewed in class, the street artists were often interviewed in their studios, or a place that really represented them. We tried to do the same in ours by placing equipment in the background, and interviewing in the spaces they rehearse in (band room, cafeteria). Another technique we used was keeping the original sound of the b roll playing at a lower volume. I thought the op-doc "Weekend- Visits" used natural sound to their advantage, and it just elevated the piece so much more by making it feel more "realistic", which is the whole point of a documentary.
Bits and pieces were pulled from everything we learned while we produced this documentary. But there were still a lot of other elements where we could have done better, and it would've elevated our piece so much more. A lot of our b roll and interview shots were dark/grainy, which is something we can attempt to better with, or it could've easily been resolved if we had used a light. We also should've has some sort of track playing in the back. At some points it felt too quiet, and we could have included music under the interviews to fix that.
