Through the immersive experience of interning with the FITlife Project, I believe that I have made significant strides towards the achievement of my first objective of learning how to effectively shoot a miniature documentary series. Although I am very familiar with how to shoot narratives or fictionalized stories by following the Hollywood conventions of maintaining a 180-degree, balancing spatial relationships, and achieving continuity, I have rarely worked in the style of “talking heads” with overlapping clips nor familiarized myself with the conventions of editing for such an approach. However, through research, talking with my site supervisor, viewing videos from the previous year’s work, and experimentation, I now feel rather comfortable shooting and editing for a documentary-type video.

            When mentally preparing for my first workout shoot, I felt very nervous and unsure of the best method for capturing the moments occurring before me. Fortunately, after finding some comforting advice in my research, I realized that shooting for a documentary truly presents its artist with a blank canvas for crafting their work. In addition, shooting for a documentary is all about capturing events as they unfold and typically factors in a high amount of spontaneity. Given this understanding, I was able to come to the conclusion that having everything precisely lined up on my camera before shooting would yield very few benefits. Instead, I realized that I would have to actively analyze the events I was capturing and adjust on the spot. While this might sound even more stressful, in many ways this understanding actually relaxed me and reinforced the notion of my artistic role in the project, which cleared up any stress regarding my presumed necessity to stick to a set “formula” for creating a documentary. Also, I quickly learned the importance of “keeping the camera running” while shooting a documentary. By capturing long takes, not only did I guarantee that I would have more content to work with and more time to make adjustments to shoots on the spot, I also made sure that I had a much higher probability of capturing a “golden moment” of spontaneity and emotional expression. Without such long takes, it is extremely likely that I would not have captured some of the powerful moments that I did.

            By researching how to effectively shoot a documentary, I also realized the powerful potential of the close-up shot. When people view videos or movies, they love to emotionally connect with the characters on screen. Although documentaries often contain individuals who are quite different from the fictionalized ones created for the purposes of a standard narrative film, people still want to feel as if they personally know these individuals being shown onscreen. Since facial expressions can reveal the innermost emotions that a person experiences, they possess the ability to speak far louder than the most eloquent monologues. By factoring this into the capture of events as they unfold, I understood that I could reveal very intimate details regarding the internal struggles of the children that I was filming in the Special Warriors program at CrossFit Hanover.

            As for technical lessons that I learned from my experience with the FITlife Project, one of the biggest things that I learned was the necessity of operating with external microphones. Audio recording is every bit as important as video recording for a film or documentary, and in many cases, the quality of sound that will be captured from the internal microphones on cameras will not be adequate enough in the professional environment. In addition, since most of my cinematography was done inside of gyms, unwanted noise was quite prevalent and everything that we could do to eliminate such noise was preferable. Having been given professional recording equipment from Dean Vaccher, a professional editor and videographer that my site supervisor directed me to, I quickly noticed a difference in the quality of sound. With a boom and two wireless lapel microphones, the quality of our recorded sound was drastically improved and nearly all of the unwanted background noise was reduced, which encourages me to utilize professional audio recording equipment more often in the future.

            Despite all these positive learning experiences, I also came across some rather frustrating obstacles in my endeavors with the internship. For one, although teamwork is rather important when creating a documentary, it is not always present. When editing for the FITlife Project’s season one, I learned firsthand the difficulties of having a volunteer abandon their position partway through the project. Not only did this challenge my understanding of what I should be doing in terms of editing, but it also led to me having to edit twice as much. In addition, I learned some challenges regarding working with Final Cut Pro on an older operating system. By not having all the up-to-date software, video playback was extremely finicky and resulted in me having to render files for as long as two days straight before I could realistically edit them.

            With that said, I still developed some very important skills and understandings as a result of my time spent editing. Above all, I learned the importance of keeping motivated and on task when editing alone. Although at times it might not seem like much progress is being done, as long as I set daily goals for where I wanted to be at the end of the day, I was able to pull through and get a lot accomplished in the grand scheme of things. Also, I learned the benefits of having a multi-cam shoot for interviews. By having footage of a medium close-up shot angled straight at the subject mixed with footage of a medium shot angled to the side of a subject, I could create a more effective pacing for editing and keep the viewers interested. Moreover, I could more easily cover up transitions or skipped portions of an interview between the two options available. Beyond that, having footage from multi-cam shoots enabled me to practice editing with different angles and syncing sound to allow for easy cuts between different shots.

            In addition to all the points mentioned, I learned the importance of really connecting to interviewees when filming. For many people, public speaking is one of their greatest fears and talking to a camera can be rather challenging. My site supervisor really stressed the importance of having your interviewees be comfortable by getting to know them personally and casually talking with them to reduce the awareness of being on camera. As I personally observed, this approach seemed to work out exceptionally well, and very rarely were we presented with an interview where the interviewee felt overwhelmed by the camera recording their words. This was also helped by preparing questions for interviews ahead of time by communicating with the interviewees several days in advance to gauge what they would feel comfortable sharing.

            All of these previously discussed points illustrate just a handful of the many lessons that I have learned regarding how to effectively shoot a miniature documentary as a result of spending time with my internship. Such skills and knowledge that I have obtained has, and will inevitably continue to have great implications on the manner in which I film or edit in the future. Furthermore, while I have certainly amassed invaluable technical tools for success in my field, I have additionally collected just as vital tools for collaborating with others and knowing how to answer my questions through proper research. By continuing to pursue an understanding of cinematography and editing in a similar manner, I feel quite confident that progress on my first learning objective will develop even further over my lifetime. For the time being though, I believe that I have reached my expected level of achievement on the first learning objective, and feel more prepared to expand on my skills in the professional workplace environment. To see more of my experiences and work accomplished with the FITlife Project, please feel free to explore the rest of my personal portfolio.