YAYYYYY *confetti*

 REFLECTION TIMME 

I have a love-hate relationship with this part. 

Initially, we wanted this documentary to represent the small groups within the arts and answer or touch on the question of whether the arts are truly important to us as a society. Being a person who does creative arts, I always felt like this passion or profession was looked down upon as it's not typically a stable source of income. Many people have either given up their passion or still go at it with very little support. I know that for some of my friends choosing to pursue arts it was hard to convince their parents or their parents were just never on board. But we really wanted to show with this documentary that the arts do have an impact on people and society either as an inspiration or just letting humans be little silly humans. That art is important and that it's not always superficial. Although the arts are subjective to each person they have an impact on everyone in one way or another.  

We really wanted this piece to resonate with our audience because sometimes it's hard to see how important any of the arts are to ourselves and the people around us. We used people around the ages of our target audience to help further the idea that this documentary is for them, we also used a few of the main arts that people take a lot of interest in to pull our audience in. I would've loved to do a part on like an artist who draws or paints but we didn't have the time so maybe that could be something we add in the future. As I mentioned before, I asked a question that I felt would help us kind of gauge where we wanted to be: "What's our target audience?" We all agreed that it was around 15-16 to about 18-19 and I think that really helped us be where we are. I feel we really started to develop ideas catered to individuals our age. I feel that my group hit our target audience but also used a lot of techniques to keep them engaged. We kept each piece relatively short and with each part having its own style it mixed up the feel and energy of each part. However, while receiving critiques we were informed that at points it got a bit boring probably due to its length. 

At the beginning of our documentary we felt it would be good to have a quote that says “Every artist was once first an amateur” besides the fact that I spelled amateur wrong we wanted to include it to further push the idea that the arts are important and if you feel inspired to do something you can do it as well. I'd like to think that we had a very specific style and techniques that we used throughout this documentary. One that's very obvious was the light leak that we used a lot and that was used to keep this kind of artsy cinematic feel to it. One that was a little less obvious was the style of editing we used. Each part was sequenced almost identically starting with who the person is and their passion field then getting into why they do what they do and delving deeper into that. Each part had its own feel to it but also represented who they are. Santi had a lot of cooler tones and was edited slower. Then Monica's part was more pink, softer and energetic with light editing. Miguel's part was very energetic, very bright (in some parts) and fast paced editing. 

    Looking back and having received all our critiques we 100% plan to redo parts of our documentary. For my portion of editing I created an arguably very long intro sequence for Santi but I LOVED how it turned out because I feel like it really captures who he is through that small part. It shows his work and his personality through film and how he is as a person, but through critique I learned that the average viewer wouldn’t know where that part is going initially so you're just very confused until like after the first half. And then it doesn't help that each portion's introductions were all extremely different from one another but we all liked that aspect about it because it shows one, a difference between our subjects but also how they express themselves. 

  To be quite honest I don't think our documentary challenges many conventions. I would say the general style of how it's done having 3 separate parts instead of intermingling them throughout the entire documentary. I mean each part is fairly conformant. Well not conformant but like it nothing too out of the ordinary. I feel the arts are a very open community, you can do almost anything from acting to music to videography and photography or do all of them. We would want to bring awareness to the arts being important in society. But it's just not seen as a “true career” path in many people's eyes. If anything that could be our “challenging conventions” because all these people would want to pursue the arts as a career and because its not seen as a true or stable career then these people are like going against the grain to pursue their passion. 

    All in all we plan to make changes to better our documentary, I'm extremely proud of what my group did. If I hadn't gotten critiques I probably would have sent it off already to get awards ( I wouldn't have been that silly). But I'm super confident about this piece and love showing it to people. My FAVORITE part about it is the music we use in the background. It kinda gives a heroic vibe to it but also inspirational. But also I loved our window editing. How we used Nat sounds and let our individual pieces breathe and let people feel it. I loved this project.