Critical Reflection

Our episodic documentary 'Make It Happen' works to develop the idea of the immigrant experience of establishing a company in the US. This documentary project has been a great experience for me and group members. To begin this reflection, I would like to start in the planning portion. When we were brainstorming ideas about what we could produce, we reflected back to our old in-class projects. We were having a hard time deciding what to do. At first, we decided as a group on a horror short film, but to a surprise, we switched up last minute and decided to do a documentary. 

I had previously worked with this same group of Isabella Galarraga and Mariana Sanchez on another documentary project. We had created the first episode of 'Make It Happen', which focused on the challenges faced with language barriers when starting a new company in the US. We wanted to produce something similar to this, so we went off the same idea and decided to produce a project that entailed information on the expansion of a company in the US and the difficulties faced when doing so. As well as this, we decided on implementing information regarding the effect that this journey had on our subject's family. Now, let's dive into the current project.

To reiterate, our documentary explores the journey of expanding and establishing a company in the US as an immigrant, with the focus being on Javier Galarraga. Javier, born in Venezuela, is the proud owner of Sumiflex, an export company that made it's way from Venezuela. Our main goal with this project was to delve deep into Javier's journey and see the effect that had on him today and his family as well. We wanted to dive into the Latin American-community in hope to inspire and encourage other Latin Americans to take risks and expand their companies as well. 

Since we went off the basis of our last documentary, we decided to make it a episodic documentary, Since it is an episodic documentary, the target audience would normally remain the same, but after my target audience research, we concluded that our target audience for this piece is people ages 38-42. Transitioning into the interviews, we decided to film Javier and his daughter Isabella Galarraga (my group member). Since we are also talking about the effects that this has had on his life and his family, we thought it best to interview Isabella because his daughter's decisions reflect his journey as well. When talking about the interviews, we struggled with the choice between direct and indirect interviews. At first, we didn't know if we wanted to include the question of the interviewer, or only show the question being answered by Javier. After careful consideration, we decided to go with indirect interviews because they looked more smooth and professional. 

Our documentary focuses on Javier's entrepreneurial journey and the effects on his life and family. Looking even further than this, our documentary also focuses on social issues such as the challenges of immigration, the hurdles faced due to cultural adaptation, and the struggles of starting a business in a new country. By choosing to make Javier the center of our documentary, we gave a voice to these issues, making them more understandable to our audience. 

The elements of my production, including the decision to create an episodic documentary, focusing on the narrative of expanding a business in the US as an immigrant, and the choice of using indirect interviews, work together to create a sense of branding. All these elements combined position my documentary as an insightful exploration of the immigrant entrepreneurial journey, making it unique from other content surrounding it.

Our audience is people ages 38-42. Most viewers will be either immigrants, social activists, or people looking to expand their viewpoint. My products engages with my target audience by focusing on impactful stories that would resonate with their interests. By using real-life cases like Javier's, our audience can see the effect of hard work and perseverance, inspiring them to pursue their goals as well. By including the portion of the project with Isabella, the documentary also fosters a connection with viewers who value family, further engaging with the audience with the content. Another way my product engages with my audience is through our social media, As I stated in my social media research on a previous blog, the target audience that we chose directly correlates with the social media platform Facebook. With the social media page that we created, we are able to post content that resonates with our target audience, which was carefully chosen by factoring in the target audience of facebook and the typical age of immigrants. 

Below, you can see a picture of our Facebook page and the link to it:

'Make It Happen' Facebook

My research into the challenges that immigrants face when starting a new company in the US has directly influenced how I approached the documentary. Since this is an episodic documentary and I went off the idea of my last documentary, I was able to build my understanding of the struggles of establishing a company in the US coming from a different company. This understanding has also allowed me to narrow my narrative, making it more informative and emotionally compelling, thus challenging the immigrant conventions by highlighting the success rather than the struggles. Our choice of indirect interviews has also challenged conventions of documentary interview styles, opting for a more narrative-driven approach instead of including a distracting question.

As this project comes to a close, I have reflected a lot on the process of my project. This journey has been very fun and full of hard work. I am very happy with the outcome me and my group have worked for. Each choice we made and each idea we have talked about has been carefully crafted and clearly shown in the final outcome. The blend of personal narratives, strategic choices in interviews, and the b-roll we made is collectively shown in our documentary that informs and resonates with our viewers.

Project Components

Hey guys, the time has come. It is time for the final product of the documentary. I have worked long and hard these past few weeks on this project and I hope is reflects. I am very happy with how this project turned out and I am very excited that I finally get to share it with you guys. Anyway, this is the time that we have all been looking forward to so lets get to it. 

In the project components, I will include the documentary and the magazine article. Below that, you can see a link that takes you directly to our social media. Without further ado, here's our final work and I hope you enjoy it!

Project Components

'Make It Happen' Facebook Page

On the next post, you will see my critical reflection, so stay tuned for that!

Final Reflective Comments

Hey guys happy Monday, and welcome back to the blog. Today, I am happy to say that the project is officially completed. As our project comes to an end, I want to say that I am extremely happy to have been with you guys every step of the way. This project has been extremely fun to make. From the planning all the way to the shooting of the doc, I have had a blast. Planning is always the hard part, but once you reach that zone where you know what you are going to produce, the rest is a breeze. 

My favorite part of this project was the filming portion. It was very fun to film and I had a great time with my group members while at it. We had some great laughs and got some great work done in the process. I very much enjoyed the editing portion as well. I have always been good at editing and have had a lot of practice with it, so I volunteered to do it for this project. It didn't take me as long as I expected, so that's something I am very proud of. The only thing I would say about the filming was that we filmed a little bit more than needed lol. We had a lot of extra footage that we didn't use, but hey, the more the better!

Tomorrow, I will post the final project components, and on Wednesday, I will be posting my critical reflection, so be sure to check that out.

Final Edits!

Hey guys welcome back! Today, I wanted to talk to you about the final edits of my project. I have finally finished editing everything and it looks amazing. I'm very proud of what we've done with this project. 

Since there were a lot of clips to download, they couldn't be sent through messages because of the size of the files. Because of this we sent them in an email, and I had to download them one by one and put them into a folder on my laptop. Although this took me around 15 to 20 minutes, it helped me organize my footage before beginning to edit. Once I put it in the folder I split the footage into three more folders: Javier’s interview, Isabella’s interview, and the b-roll. 

Now it was time to get into the editing. While editing, I did quite a few things to tweak the original video. For one, I brought down the exposure by-3. This made the clip more natural and more appealing to the eye since the lighting in the room we filmed in was a little bit too much. Another thing that I did to all the clips was increase the audio gain on all the clips. This made it so that you could hear Javier in the interview more clearly and louder. I had to also add music in the background. It took me a while to find the right music for this documentary because I couldn't find many sounds that gave off an inspirational and happy mood at the same time. None of them could really fit, until I found the perfect music. 

Because I added music, it was important to increase the audio gain of the original clips and to lower the audio gain of the music to make it so that the music doesn't take over what is being said. I've had some projects in the past that had this problem so this time I made sure to make the sound as clear as possible. 

Another thing that I did was cut out the interview question. Since we were doing indirect interviews, we had to cut out the question being asked so that we only see and hear the subject and not the interviewer. This made it a lot smoother since it looks more natural. Also, when adding the b-roll into the timeline, I immediately cut out the sound. This is something that doesn't necessarily need sound since it's only for the visual. That way, you could still hear Javier speaking in the background while the b-roll is playing. 

While editing I realized that we filmed a little bit too much. We were so scared that we weren't going to have enough footage, that we ended up filming too much lol. This isn't such a problem because the more footage we have, the more things we can play around with. Overall, this editing experience was very pleasant. I was really invested into the editing that I ended up editing almost all of it in one afternoon. I'm very excited to show you guys the finished result but sadly, you can't see that until next week. 

To make up for that, here is a sneak peak of my timeline: 

Thank you so much for tuning in and I hope you have a great rest of your weekend! 

Unexpected Turn of Events

Hey guys welcome back and happy Thursday! Today, I wanted to talk to you about something unexpected that happened. Last night, everybody in my school received the message saying that school was cancelled today. This is something that nobody was really expecting because as it turns out, a pipe burst in the front of the school, and everything flooded. This includes the carpool lane, the student parking lot, and even the teacher parking lot. 

Although this is not good, just gave me some extra time to progress in this project. Today, me my group got together to talk about some final thoughts for the project and ended up doing a little more than that. We did have to film some extra b-roll and ended up re-filming all our interviews. We met up at Javier’s office to re-film and brought him his company shirt to make it look more professional. 

Now, I know what you're thinking, “why did we re-film everything?”. Well, when we first filmed our interview, it felt a little rushed. On top of that, we decided to reshoot the entire thing to get rid of any inconsistencies in the lighting and the clothing that Javier was wearing. After we filmed, we realized that we ended up filming a little bit too much. Since our documentary must be around 5 minutes (with not much extra wiggle room), We had to decide which questions were more important to keep in the documentary.

When re-filming Javier’s interview, we felt that he was a lot more in the zone and ended up elaborating a lot better than he did on the first try. Now, it looks a lot smoother. Another thing that was better about reshooting our interview was that we filmed it in a continuous manner. Instead of a continuous shot with errors that would have to be edited out, we made it so that it was perfect on the first run. This made it a lot easier for me to edit since there was no real errors to have to go through and cut out. This also made it a lot smoother as well.

Today, Javier also had a big shipment coming to get picked up so luckily, we were able to get b-roll of him moving the stuff in his warehouse near the truck’s pickup zone. We also got more b-roll of the type of shipments he was sending out. For example, he was sending out Kodak FLEXCEL plates. I am not entirely sure what this is, but I was able to get b-roll of it lol.

 Below, you can see a clip of our final shooting and some b-roll. If you watch it, you can see that it's a lot smoother than last time. You can also see that this is a clip before I edited out the question.

Thank you so much for tuning in and I hope you have a great rest of you day. I will see you next time!

Group Meetings!

Hey guys welcome back! I hope you've had a great weekend and are ready for the new week. I wanted to hop on here and chat a little about what I did today. Today in class, we did group meetings. Like last time we talked about our project and gave each other feedback of what we could improve. This is helpful because when it comes close to the end of the line there are some things that need tweaking and it's best to get some outside point of view feedback. As we went around the table I gave a lot of good feedback to my group. 

When it came around to me, I gave them the link to my blog. They quickly went on and began to skim through my posts and give me feedback on anything that they thought I needed help with or could improve. I had explained that we were close to finishing and that all we had to do was finish filming. I had explained that I was having a little trouble figuring out what other things we can put in for b-roll. I had enough b-roll to place into the documentary, but it was giving me a feeling that it needed more b-roll pertaining to the individual (in this case Javier). 

One of my group members gave me the bright idea to input more things about his past, for example, more pictures pertaining to his past. My teacher had told me that we couldn't put anything into this documentary that we didn't create ourselves, so we showed a little bit of b-roll of us filming a slow walkthrough of some old pictures. This is helpful in helping the audience put together the information faster and understand Javier and his expansion to the US on the deeper level. 

We also talked about the print component portion of the project that I need to do. For me, it is the magazine spread. They asked me how it was going, and I said it was going very well and all we had to do was add some nice pictures to create the magazine look. We did have to go back in and make sure our magazine had all the correct magazine conventions and this was helpful as well.

Here is an image of me and my group:

In case you were curious, you can see me in the back right with the blonde hair and black shirt. Overall, they gave me a lot of great feedback that actually helped me improve my project planning and help me organize my head a little bit. Thank you so much for tuning in and I hope you have a great rest of your day. I'll see you next time!