Independent Component 2

A) I, Jake Reyes, affirm that I have completed my independent component hours which represents 45 hours of work.

B) My mentor Tom Kam helped me a lot with this project with advice and lending me his cameras. He has also helped me get this project almost finished in volunteering to finish the color correcting which I am very thankful to him for. I also am thankful to iPoly drama for letting me interview them and Fullerton College for letting me film parts of the festival. The book Rebel Without a Crew written by Robert Rodriguez helped me learn how to shoot a film largely on your own. I also found the article Your B-Roll is Your A-Roll from the filmmaker sight masteringfilm.com very helpful. Lastly How to Guide Your Documentary Interviewee by Todd Grossman helped me extract the answers that I was going for out of my interviewees.

C) Did it.

D) I have fully filmed documentary on a high school drama experience at a theater competition. I didn't realize how strenuous the editing process really was until I started this project. I had edited projects before, but usually they were 2-8 minutes with 2-10 minutes of film and weren't nearly as complex. This film has multiple layers and literally has hours of footage to sort through and then be condensed into a roughly half hour film. Once again I am thankful that I have a mentor who is an editing aficionado to help and guide me. The film Should be done within a couple of weeks and hopefully before the end of May. I have a new script entitled Two For the Road in the works that I feel confident I can film parts of this summer.

In my last Independent Component I focused strictly on the stage of pre-production. This time around I was able to work with Pre-Production and Post-Production. In a documentary you must have 3 key things in order to be interesting and evoke a story and those are interviews, B-Roll and on screen action.

The interviews take up roughly 2/5 of the film and during the interviews I encouraged the interviewees to be themselves to get conferrable and Brooke really did. My questions mainly had to do with the festival itself and the experience of being a high school drama student.

 The second component of making a documentary is the B-Roll which is basically visually relieve form just looking at an interviewee's face through out the entire film. B-Roll took up about 2/5 of the film. So I had to scope out different locations through out the Fullerton College campus that were visually appealing. You need a lot of variation in the B-Roll and it needs to make sense to what the interviewee is saying and I think I did a decent job of that in my film.

 The third piece needed in a documentary is on screen action. This things that happen on camera that are related to the story and push the documentary forward. The first scene here shows the improv team warming up for their scene and the second scene shows Suessical performing their musical at Fullerton. Technically I wasn't supposed to film the actors performing during the musical but I felt it was needed for the film so I did a bit of guerrilla style shooting.

Applied
This component really helped me with my second answer, for my essential question "How can a director best maximize the potential for a low budget independent film?",which focuses on working with actors and production value. Because the acting was more interviews I had to figure out how to speak to the actors and direct them so they didn't feel like I was pushing them but I still got the answers I wanted. The idea of B-Roll also really did help me with the idea of production value and making a film aesthetically pleasing. The experience also did help with my third answer which is make due with the resources you have available. When filming a documentary a lot of things are unscripted and you need to go with the flow in a way and be ready for anything that can be useful in your film. This is mainly where on screen action comes into play.