Documentary Reflection

 Katherine Wathen

Documentary Reflection

 

I chose this topic because it connected with me personally. I grew up going to a Catholic school my whole life, which is strange now going to a school that isn’t Catholic. Since this isn’t a Catholic School, I think sharing about my own Catholic education experiences and it’s benefits and the things I loved about it is a great idea to share to my peers for not only them to learn about me but also to learn more about the Catholic Church and the education as well. Since I personally resonate with the Christian faith more now than the Catholic faith, I think this is a great story to share that even if you are grown up being taught one thing, it can give you a great outlook on other types of faith and relationship with the Lord. This topic was easy to do since I am passionate about it, and had a lot of information to share.

 One of the obstacles I faced was finding online sources that weren’t blogs or biased sources. I steered clear of these blog sources of parents of Catholic children and sites that seemed to fabricate information. I also had trouble with photos, since I couldn’t really go into a Catholic school and take photos of the kids in class obviously, but I did use my resources well. My high school priest, Father Norman, has an instagram with videos and pictures of the kids at my high school participating in service and just daily school photos and such that made some of my pictures and videos very fitting for the video since they are actually from my high school. I used his “instagram reels” in my documentary, and I slowed some of the videos down and muted them just to keep the audience looking at something while my narration was going in the back. I also didn’t want just slides without words and only talking, so I first struggled finding a way to type on my photos successfully, but I figured it out and so I think this spiced up my photos with some key points for the audience to follow. I found success in the over all putting together of my documentary in iMovie, since I’ve used this app a lot before and I would say that I have a pretty good handle on it. I found struggle but then success in my audio recordings, my narration. It was very easy since once again I know how to use iMovie well, but being able to take a full audio clip without a mistake, with minimal background noise, and at a good speed was difficult. I tend to speak fast and so I had to make myself slow down and catch my breath so that I wasn’t speeding through everything too much. I ended up getting it down to a good pace and my time worked out perfectly well too, being around four and a half minutes long. What I learned from this project was that a documentary takes a lot of different preparations and steps, but once all your ideas are laced out it is pretty easy to put it all together. I enjoyed this project and putting together my final completed video.