C-SPAN Documentary

For the C-SPAN Documentary project, I worked with Miles and Matt, and focused on taking a closer look at the importance of reversing the physical inactivity epidemic, especially in schools.  One thing that we had to do was narrow down our topic.  First, we had a lot of ideas, and we were not really sure which was the best.  I suggested doing something involving obesity, because that is what my dad works on so we would be able to get high-profile interviews.  We were not very interested in the idea of obesity on a topic until I suggested taking the angle of physical activity in schools.  That seemed to be an interesting and relatable topic, so we decided to use it as our main idea.

            Next, we scheduled four interviews: one with my dad, one with an employee of Nike who works on physical inactivity, and two with Miles’ old teachers.  A skill that I learned from this project is how to properly interview someone.  Although I’ve conducted numerous interviews before, these interviews needed to be a lot more professional and put together.  One thing that my dad told me was to try to ask good follow up questions.  Because of this, I tried to focus on really listening to the answers that people gave me and analyzing them to ask follow up questions.

            We had a lot of obstacles during this project.  One challenge was during our fourth interview with Caitlin Morris.  We decided to interview her in the W Hotel in DC, per her request.  When we arrived, we realized the lobby was too noisy to film in and the “library” she suggested we film in was not really a library or a place we could use.  We asked the desk staff where we could conduct the interview and an employee suggested a quiet space we discovered was not really that quiet, or a technology room that was small and ill suited for an on-camera interview.  However, we had to make it work, so we moved some chairs and set up the tripod.  When we opened the light, we found out that there was no light bulb in it, which was kind of a problem.  We had to just go with the flow and figure out what to do as problems popped up.

            This assignment definitely reflects my growth in the Media category.  I did not just a lot of research to make this project go smoothly, but also dedicated a lot of time to editing the video itself.  My skills in Final Cut improved vastly throughout the time that I worked on this project through many hours of figuring out new skills as well as remembering old ones.  Overall, this project was a great success that I had a lot of fun creating.