Ice Breaker Critical Reflection

 Documentary Critical Reflection

The documentary Ice breaker follows Sasha Kaiser, one out of two girls on the Cypress Bay Lighting Hockey team. We were aiming to change the way women in sports are depicted in society and shine a light on those who are ignored by the media industry. 

Before starting the documentary, my group and I started researching documentaries, given that it would be the first one we’ve ever made, nor were we familiar with the process. Our process of complying with information from documentaries started in AICE Media. We were able to take notes of the techniques used in various documentaries like “American Promise” and “Abstracts” that explored various concepts and techniques. Those techniques were later applied in our documentary-like for example having a b-roll of Sasha interacting with her teammates as seen a lot in “American promise”. This gave the audience a different angle on the subjects, allowing them to connect more to the people in the documentary. Additionally, we included ‘breathing’ spaces in between content that consisted of just a b-roll with just the original sound with no voiceover or an interviewee talking, to let the audience take in the information just given, as seen in “Abstract”.  Furthermore, before the documentary, we compiled a case study about women in sports. Consisting in how they are depicted in society, the idea media has built that's influences the way everyone sees women participating in sports. This research gave us an idea of what we wanted to focus on with the documentary, a girl in a male-dominated sport, and how to shift the perception of women in said sports. 

From the research, for the project, we also learned how to keep an audience interested in what they are watching. Our main target audience would consist of teenage girls (14-19) who have wanted to join a male-dominated sport. The piece serves as an inspiration to its viewers to break the stereotypes in the sports world. To keep them entertained, the main thing we aimed for while filming was to capture various angles of the b-roll during the games. For example, Action b-roll during the games like tracking shots of Sasha and other teammates and action shots from various angles (2nd floor-high angles-, shot from the benches-medium shots-). The variety of shots helps enhance the intensity of the sport to the viewers as if they were watching in real life. Additionally, when the interviewers are talking about playing we showed clips of them playing or if they talk about the team we showed clips of the team interacting with each other, this way we have both audio descriptions and visuals to complement it. This helps audiences know exactly how something happens without needing to imagine the situation. 

In the documentary, we wanted to tackle the social dilemma that girls shouldn't play rough sports (like hockey, football, rugby, etc) because they are seen as weaker or will not be able to handle the hardship that comes with the sport, which has been proven wrong multiple times. This builds unbreakable walls women have to destroy to be taken seriously in sports. Women in sports are one of the least represented social groups in the media, their issues and successes aren't shown as much as men’s are. More specifically a woman in hockey which is rarely seen in cinema or tv shows. With our documentary, we wanted to change that, and give light to the community of girls that play hockey. We aimed for this project to be a way to inform people about how having girls on the team don't affect the performance of the team overall. Actually, as stated in the documentary it helps the team grow closer together like a family. 

All in all, this project taught me a huge amount of concepts when it came to making a documentary and talking about social issues. Though my group struggled at times during production, we were able to overcome and develop a project that accomplished our original goals of fighting social opinions of women in sports.

Welcome back

Hello guys, I am back into blogging for my A-level media class. It's been a few months since I posted s, and I've done a few projects since then. My most recent one has been a documentary titled "Ice Breaker". about girls in an all-male hockey team. 

Ice Breaker Documentary

    This project was the first time I dived deep into documentaries. I have never created something similar to it, nor do I watch them during my free time. Doing this project has been a process of new discoveries to develop the best documentary possible with my group. 

    To begin, my group and me had to develop the purpose of our documentary, and what would be the context. We had a few various ideas like; mental health in gymnastics, the cypress bay band, or clothes affecting the environment. However, after some consideration, we landed on making the documentary about one of our team members, Sasha, given that she makes up one of the two girls on the Cypress Bay Hockey Team.  

    After we had the topic down, we had to plan and make an outline, of how we were gonna prepare, shoot and edit everything. We started with the first step which was making the Outline. Writing down all the b-roll and interviews we should get for the project (Sasha's, The other girl on the team, Other teammates, and the coaches). Additionally, we wrote down the types of shots we wanted to have to express the idea of how the girls are beneficial to the team. 

    In addition, to planning the outline we also made a schedule of the days we will film and edit and started our production log. We started the project on a Wednesday and planned as quickly as we could to be ready because Sasha's game was that Sunday and Monday. We only had two games to shoot the b-roll and interviews we needed, so we arrived at each game an hour before each one, to make use of time. 

    While shooting we started with Sasha's interview in the girl's locker room (which was one of the stadium's party rooms) and then moved on to one of her male teammate's interviews, in the same room. We thought because it was a party room we could do the interviews in the room, but that was proven wrong when a staff member asked us to film somewhere else, in the middle of his interview. Here is where we ran into our first problem because anywhere else would be very noisy, because of the games going on in the stadiums, and we were able to get useful footage. Luckily, the teammate knew about a small storage room where we will be able to finish our interviews, though the background change would slightly affect the flow of our documentary, we hoped the rest of the content would distract the viewers from this. 

    Our main goal while filming was to get the most footage possible because we weren't sure what we will need later down the process and we will be unable to obtain it. So while Sasha was playing, eugenia and I were filming any possible we could get; Long shots from the floor, long shots from the top of the bleachers, tracking shots, wide shots of the game, two shots of teammates, Medium shots of the coach, you get the point. That made our next problem, which was too much footage. We ended up with 120+ videos, causing us to have an overwhelming amount of material when starting to edit, but at least we knew we had enough. 

    When it came to editing everything, Sasha was responsible for putting everything together, while eugenia and I were making/editing various things to add like voiceovers and editing a few clips. Fortunately, because of a hurricane, we were given more time to finish the documentary. We as a class decided to move the turn-in date to thanksgiving break, to take back the time we weren't able to make much progress in the project. 

    Editing during the thanksgiving break caused a few problems though. Firstly, everyone was preoccupied with family/ friends during thanksgiving so making time to work on the project was challenging, but luckily we were able to pull through. Until the editing software, Sasha was using messed with the audio of some of the interviews. Apparently when she tried to export it the audio became louder, and without any way to fix it. We decided as a group to leave it given that the due date was only a few minutes away and the rest of the content was good enough. 

    Even though we were worried we weren't going to make the due date, our group worked together to turn in our best project possible given the circumstances. 

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I wanted to start something new this year and have songs recommendation for each week, so here are the first ones 

🎵Song Recs🎵

𝅘𝅥𝅮Generation- TripleS 

𝅘𝅥𝅮Blue flame- LE SSERAFIM 

𝅘𝅥𝅮A lonely night- The Weeknd  

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