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.