Back Like I Never Left

 

Hello.

     I have not interacted with my blog for a few months now, even though I assumed I would based on how much I enjoyed creating posts during my film opening production earlier this year. I haven't stopped creating my own projects since then, I actually have a few projects I could have documented my process on, and I'd like to detail how the most recent of the few came to be. 

    Last month, I planned out a documentary about how people tend to attach such unexplainable yet profound meanings to small trinkets that come into their possession. It was the first time I had ever tried my hand at creating a documentary, and I had the help of two friends in my media class. We planned out four interviews with people who had different stories about their collecting of trinkets and baubles, whether it was someone who collected a ton or could connect a specific feeling/memory to one object.

    The documentary did not end up being on the topic we initially planned out, though. During the second interview in our series of scheduled interviews, we interviewed a friend and aspiring filmmaker named Alex who wanted to talk about a corrupted SD card that he claimed was the reason he pursued film. While we were shooting B-roll, we had the idea of shooting a clip of him scrolling through all of the corrupted footage, and while we did it, we were both dumbfounded when we saw the lost footage magically reappear before our eyes. The meaning Alex found in his useless broken SD card that he had so thoroughly explained in the interview was no longer real to him, and finding the moment and the shift in meaning as a result of a new context so riveting, we decided to change our documentary topic to just this moment. 

    With the pre-recovery interview as well as another extensive interview post-SD recovery(together with an interview of Alex's Mom,) the total footage we had filmed came around to a whole hour. The cutting process for this hour's work was tough and unlike any editing job I had ever done. This being my first documentary ever, I was surprised to realize that most of the time I would spend working on it would be editing and structuring the interviews. The process was very grindy and resulted in a 3-day long headache, but I eventually managed to create something I was moderately proud of. The final doc ended up being 7 minutes and 42 seconds long, and it had a discernible narrative structure with a beginning, middle, and end. I named teh documentary Recovery and you can watch it right here.