Finished

My documentary is complete, at last! It's nine minutes and twenty seconds in length. I had to edit it a bit to get it even that short, and I would like to have it a little shorter so as not to bore people, but I can't really figure out what isn't necessary to the video.

Reflections:

While up until today I was having issues with the audio, everything seems to be working okay now. I think a strength of my documentary is that I actually went out and interviewed people that I did not know, and got opposing perspectives on a controversial issue. In this way, I think I fulfilled the requirements of the assignments. I think a weakness of my documentary, however, is that it does not have enough of a particular style. I tried to give it some style by using the "cross blur" transition throughout and the faded, "gradient-white" subtitle, which almost look kind of smokey, but it certainly was not as styled as other videos, such as the skateboarding documentary. I rather like my intro, however, which plays Bon Jovi's "One Last Cigarette," which is obviously relevant to the documentary, while showing many shots of discarded cigarette butts. The cigarette butts are things that were once used but are now tossed and forgotten, much like smoking in general on campus soon will be.

My main concern is that my documentary won't be captivating enough. I would like it to be fun to watch, but after the intro, it gets a lot drier. I can't really think of how to make the subject more "fun," however. Having never used iMovie before and rarely ever used a video camera, I'm relieved that it came out as good as it did, even if it could be better. Meeting new people to interview also was not as scary as I initially thought. All in all, the experience was a lot more enjoyable than I would have imagined when we were first assigned the project.