Documentary in the Making

Hey this is Michael M.

This year I am senior in a very small high school in Oakland. Each senior is making a year long project related to their internship. Mine is Zeum and I also go to a video program after school. I get a lot of support in video making in my after school program called the factory and at Zeum. So my project is a documentary on myself and how I grew from a shy person in school to a person that loves to express himself in front the entire school.

This documentary isn't any ordinary documentary with interviews and narrative It will be told in a very dense poem I made that expands the entire four years (of high school). This means that what you see on the screen is words telling my story = a poem. There will be images in the background too. This is what makes it a documentary. It will include personal stories that I experience that I never told anyone else but myself. So it will be a personal Peace about my life so that people can relate to. Right now I just finish the first rough draft and I am so excited about it because its building up right in front of me.

Through Struggles,
Challenges,
I made me. - a line from my documentary.

Zeum staff are really helping me a lot with organizing my timeline for my project. I feel I get a lot of my creative ideas here. When I work in the music video production lab I pay close attention to the educator who is instructing the kids. I pay attention to the type of background the kids would choose and the costumes they wear. I aways wonder if those fit together if they would look right in front of a camera. I will be thinking about that in my mind. It's like a puzzle - what works, what doesn't. Even though my video is all words, this is still inspirational because I can look at the colors and think about how to use color in mine.

For example, one day a group of boys were making a music video - two of them were wearing a bird mask and one was just rapping. They had some kind of lava background and I saw that it worked well with their costumes since their mask were red and orange. It gave me ideas about what I should add in my documentary.

I hope that my movie will turn out great. To be continued...