FINAL Film + Website

https://jpereznogueiras.wixsite.com/rduncovered

Why looking ahead is important

Last week, I was supposed to film my final interview with two people that were with Sebastian when he first came into contact with the parasite. Unfortunately, due to uncontrollable circumstances,that interview was not able to happen. So, we decided to move it to Tuesday of this week and do it right after school. 

All went well and there weren't any problems with getting the interview set up. Everything was running smoothly. However, a few minutes into the interview, it dawned on me that I wouldn't be using a single clip from this interview in the final piece. I realized that I was digressing too far from the central topic of the documentary. Rather than focusing on the disease itself, I was placing too much emphasis on Sebastian's story, which is only really meant to be more of a personal anecdote about the disease and the rare possibility of curing it rather than a full narrative. With this in mind, I thanked the interviewees for their time and, once home, got to work reorganizing the excerpt in my head, this time placing extreme focus on the disease itself.

Going beyond the documentary itself, I want to complete the poster and website within two days, hopefully by Friday, in order to give myself a lot of breathing room for editing the film piece. The overall focus and tone of the poster and websites will be outlined in a later blog post. 

Second Interview: Mrs. DeLeon

Soon after Sebastian's interview, I had an interview scheduled with his mother for when she came back home from work. As I had not been to the DeLeon household before, I really had no idea where I would be filming, so everything from lighting to composition had to be thought out on the spot. In Sebastian's interview, I really liked how the camera was framed, so I decided to do another interview with the subject in the upper left third. However, I wanted the interview with his mother to be a bit more formal but be in a setting that naturally exerted a feeling of "family". After all, Mrs. DeLeon would without a doubt in my mind have the most heartfelt interview as she had to cope with the near loss of her own kin. To do this, I had the interview set up down in the open, rather than Sebastian's interview which was done in his room.

With the setting chosen and the questions prepared, all that was left was getting through the interview. Unfortunately, this had only been the first time that I had ever met Mrs. DeLeon and therefore did not have nearly an intimate of a relationship as I did with her son. I was honestly afraid the interview would suffer from this as she would not feel as comfortable opening up to someone who was practically a stranger to her. Thankfully, I was completely wrong. Every answer given was rich with detail and emotion. I also gave myself the liberty of creating some questions on the spot, as a sort of response to the statements Mrs. DeLeon was making, essentially turning the interview into more of a conversation as time went on.

The only real concern that I had was, like in Sebastian's interview, the lighting. This interview was done at night, so there was no worry about the Sun creeping into the frame and letting the image become overexposed. However, the DeLeon household has a lot of lamps and as a result created a lot of awkward shadows, no matter where the camera was. With a bit of experimentation, the lighting was fixed and looked very good once opened on my computer. All that is left for filming is the B-Roll and the interview with the two girls that were with Sebastian when he had jumped into the lake.

First Interview: Sebastian DeLeon

On Monday, March 26th, I completed my first interview. This time, it was with the surviving patient of the brain eating amoeba that is the focus of this documentary excerpt: Sebastian DeLeon. Now, before filming, I had arrived at his house at around 2 PM and began filming around 4PM...real productive, I know. However, since Sebastian is a friend of mine, we spent the extra time we had on our hands discussing what my vision for this documentary was really supposed to be. I believe that having this conversation beforehand was actually crucial in keeping Sebastian levelheaded and clear-minded during the course of the interview. 

Since I do not have a camera setup of my own, I had asked a friend of mine to lend me his camera in order to film the visuals of the documentary. So while I was chatting up Sebastian, I began to toy around with this camera, sort of getting the feel for it before putting it to use. As for the setup, I'm really happy with how the interview came out. I was originally really concerned with the lighting, but luckily, right before we began to film, a cloud actually came and blocked some of the bright sunlight, providing a much cleaner image. Also, I was also borrowing that same friend's tripod. However, I have had plenty of experience with tripods before so it was a piece of cake to set it up, and the framing of the image looked beautiful, with DeLeon sitting comfortably in the Upper Left third with just enough head room.

All in all, the interview went really smoothly and it had just what I was looking for in my interviews. It had also been a long time since I was truly behind a camera and it felt really good just to get back into the rhythm of the film-making process.

Interview Questions

For my documentary, I wanted it to be primarily driven through the interviews. As a result of this, I knew I had to create a set of questions that I would be asking the interviewees. Here was the final list I came up with to use while interviewing: 

1. Can you tell me what you were doing the day you first came into contact with the brain eating amoeba?
2. What happened in the time right after you jumped into the lake? (According to the news sources in a previous post, Sebastian came into contact with it after jumping into a lake).
3. What were the doctors saying before and after you were diagnosed with the parasite?
4. Do you remember the medical procedures you had to go through?
5. What happened when you woke up and how long was it before you back on your feet?
6. How do you think this event has impacted your family?

Obviously, these questions are written as if I were speaking directly to Sebastian but they will have to be modified to fit the grand total of three interviews. I have decided that for the interviews, I would place the story in chronological order, which sort of falls into a three-part story arc: Before Sebastian contracted the parasite, when he contracted it, and after it was cured. To fit this story arc, I have set up three interviews: Sebastian, his mother, and two people that were with him in the near hours of him contracting the disease. Through this many interviews, I hope to have a lot of footage to fill in the time.

Late Post

Sorry for missing the last week of submissions. To sum up the time lost, I basically researched about Sebastian de Leon, what the disease was, how he contracted it etc. 

Apparently, the disease is so rare that it is twice as likely to be struck by lightning. As a result, I believe that I figured out what I would be doing for this project. I wish for this TV documentary to be a part of a series that focuses on rare diseases that are found around the world. I will be going through the overall outline of this TV series in a later blog post.

Also, I have looked through various news articles that talk about Sebastian's miraculous survival story, including big names such as CNN and ABC News. What's interesting about how these two sources presented the information is that CNN almost exclusively focused on the disease itself while ABC allowed for a more in depth look at the overall story. Both, however,included a video report of the lead medical examiner that saved Sebastian's life. Due to both sources including clips from this interview with Sebastian's doctor, it can only be assumed that this has been a medical breakthrough, especially since Sebastian has come out of this relatively unscathed. I have linked both sources below:

CNN Link
ABC News Link

Ask and you shall receive

When I was at my lowest, most desperate point for new ideas, an idea was presented to me in the form of my friend Andres. Now, I've known Andres since around 6th grade but we had only just begun to hang out in recent times. So when it dawned on me that Andres had just solved all my problems about this project, he really surprised me. It was like a miracle.

A miracle who went by the name "Sebastian de Leon".

Sebastian de Leon is one of the few people known to have survived a (insert deadly condition here...I'll ask him more about it later on). Now, I've also been good friends with Sebastian for a while so I had heard about his miraculous story. But when Andres suggested that I throw away my idea about collective identity out the window and replace it with Sebastian's story, I knew it had to be good.

Quickly thanking Andres, I ran outside and called Sebastian, who I knew was at lunch at the time. We begin to talk and I pitch the idea to make a small documentary about what had happened to him. To my surprise, he was extremely excited to be a part of my piece and he said he would be glad to help me.

I don't have much outlined for the piece but I have a good feeling about it. I feel like it could be one of my best pieces to date--if I play my cards right. I'll update this blog as more developments are made for this new documentary.

How the heck do I do this?

So following what I mentioned in the last post, I finally had a main topic to follow. But as I attempted to create a sort of storyboard for how i wanted this documentary to flow, I found myself at a MASSIVE barrier: How to get this group of clowns to seem more like a collective identity rather than just a string of friends that stick together for no reason. In other words, I didn't know how to frame this friend group properly.

I had hoped that I would be able to get some help in this on Friday but had no such luck. My classmates were just as lost as I was when it came to this topic. Many of them attempted to help me find a way to introduce the topic, but there was still the huge problem of how to frame the documentary and design the questions so that they may more closely resemble the main idea of the piece.

As a result of this conundrum that I found myself in, I decided to sit in my room for the rest of the afternoon and really try and form up a draft for a possible storyboard. Unfortunately I was getting nowhere, so I decided to go to the source of the idea in the first place and invited Santi over to my house.

Santi and I grinded out ideas for the documentary for maybe an hour and a half but I ended up more lost than before. It really seemed like there would be no end to this nightmare of confusing thoughts and lost ideas. It seemed like a miracle to help me get through this part of the project.

Tricky Ideas

Well, its been a rather busy week when it comes to reaching a final decision on what to do my documentary on. At the beginning of the week, I was able to chat with a few of my fellow Media Studies classmates on what they thought I should do. However, the next big step I took in developing a plan for an entire documentary TV series would not come from a fellow classmate, rather an old friend, Santiago, or "Santi".

Now, I have been good friends with Santi for a while now so he definitely knows just how much this project means to me as well as my future endeavors. So when he suggested that I make a documentary about his friend group, I knew not to take it lightly. We had been talking awhile about making a sort of "mockumentary" about our whole friend group. But when Santi suggested that we make the video more serious, it really started to seem like it might actually be possible to make this more like a legitimate documentary.
So as we finish up talking about our idea, 7th period rolls around--my media studies period.

During the class, my class is being called up to talk about an practice essay we had written the week before. When I come up, my essay is relatively unedited, so there wasn't really much to discuss there. As a result of this freed up time, I decided to ask my teacher, Mrs. Stoklosa, about the possibility of making this documentary. To my surprise, the result was not an immediate denial. I think my teacher saw just how passionate I was for the topic so she instead suggested a small change to the main idea of the video.

Since the prompt was meant for a TV series, Mrs. Stoklosa suggested that I make the prompt something broader: something that a wider range people could be interested in. As a result, together we formed the main idea that this documentary about friendships would be shaped around: How teenagers form a sense of collective identity.

First Draft of Ideas

This blog post will be to show what directions I seem to be going when it comes to brainstorming possible topics for my documentary excerpt.

Here is what I have come up with so far:

• Riding a bike for the first time as a teenager*
• Does prom matter?
• When a group that is recognized as a minority in a country becomes the majority within an area
• Impact of the suburban life on young minds once they are thrown into the real world
• Going from a "normal" household to a monoparental home**
• Becoming a doctor in America, despite already being recognized as a doctor in another country
• Drugs at Cypress Bay High School
• Growing up with no family near you***
• Day in the life of a Cypress Bay security guard****

*This topic may or may not remain on this list. I wanted to do a sort of cute "taking your first steps" experience with someone that is more grown up. The documentary would follow my friend Nacho and his experiences with riding a bike for the first time. However, I recently became aware that he would be moving back to Argentina soon. As I do not know when this may be, I will likely have to discount this idea early on.

**This topic offers a lot of possibilities as it is one of the more versatile options on this list. I could do this documentary as a sort of case study on the experiences that my sister and family had when this came about their lives and how it impacted them. I could also likely take a bunch of research and slip it in the piece to sort of support the overall experience of my family as well as the experiences documented and studied by professionals.

***Not direct relatives. I mean like grandparents, uncles and cousins. That sort of deal. Living without any family is really much more of a tragedy than I prefer to outline in a piece.

****I would like to do this piece in a sort of humorous, "Michael Moore"-esque fashion. I would follow a bunch of security guards around school and instead of mostly asking them questions about their jobs, I would like to focus on the types of lives they lead outside of the workplace. It really is a unique idea because it is not something most students really think about when they bump into one of these guards within their every day lives.

This is only a rough draft of my various ideas. I plan to narrow them down and refine those that are left in order to reach a final decision on my documentary's topic.

Me, My Rules, and I

So it turns out that coming up with a practical yet interesting documentary for someone at my age to do is actually quite difficult. However, that does not mean that it is already time to throw in the towel. On the contrary, actually. 

I've given myself the liberty of just about the entire week to be able to find interesting subjects worth me documenting. However, there are some things that I had to take into account before I set out to find some topics. I've laid out my self-impose guidelines below:

1. Do not choose a topic that cannot be completed within the given timeframe.
2. Do not choose a topic that requires an egregious amount of interviews to portray whichever message you choose to portray.
3. Don't choose something boring. Don't be afraid to try something unique.

The purpose of these guidelines is to give me a basic idea of the topics that I may be able to touch upon for this topic.

#1 reminds me that I do have a very finite amount of time to develop this entire piece, so I cannot choose a very broad or extensive topic, for I will surely lose track of time and it will be a repeat of last year once more.

#2 is really a guideline that I debated heavily with myself before setting it in stone (or online I suppose). While I do believe that having a wide range of interviewees tends to bolster the strength in the message of most documentaries, my biggest concern is that these interviews will eat up my time-which is something I simply cannot afford for this piece.

#3 is not much of a guideline but I believe that it is the most important for me to keep in mind while searching for topics. Many times, I have found myself thinking of many secure and unimaginative themes, which is always a concern of mine when it comes to developing an original piece. I want to be sure that no matter the topic that I choose, it is a subject that really is unique to me and truly represents who I am as a creative force.

"Don't call it a comeback" - LL Cool J

To whomever this concerns,

This is a Blog for any reader to understand the process gone through to create this documentary excerpt as well as all my research and thoughts on this journey.

For my last project, I began my blogging by introducing myself. However, as my introduction has already been made, I'd rather explain the title of this blog and what it means to me.

I decided to call this blog "The Comeback" because of my experiences with my project for my AS level portfolio. My AS project was an utter disaster from start to finish, and there really is nothing to blame myself. I prioritized studying for other examinations and left every part of that project for the very last minute-and this lack of time management cost me heavily. 

So, as a result of my experiences with my last project, I have immediately decided to set up a calendar with due dates for myself to keep up with. NO EXCEPTIONS. I will be uploading this calendar as soon as I get all my due dates sorted out. Hopefully, I will be able to adhere to this calendar, which will in turn allow me to develop a much higher quality project than the last one I made. A project that I can feel proud to call my own.

Sincerely,

Joaquin Perez Nogueiras