After nine weeks of work, David Small’s Television Production class completed their narrative and documentary projects. A narrative, according to Oxford, is “a spoken or written account of connected events; a story,” while a documentary is a film capturing a specific event, person, or time period.
The students had to brainstorm ideas, write a script, film everything, and edit for the narratives as well as the documentaries. These students had to decide what to document and who to interview, as well as research their topic.
“Figuring out what to do for the documentary wasn’t very hard for me to do. I already had a general idea before even starting the project, so I was ahead of the game a little bit,” said FCHS junior Camryn Ngov.
Meanwhile, fellow junior Paul Addington had a bit of a different way of figuring out his topic concept. “The process for deciding what to base the projects about was mainly just spitting out ideas with friends and fellow group members,” said Addington.
There were some struggles for the students. The maximum length of the final video was eight minutes, but many students had more than twice that amount of raw footage. Ngov had a total of 18 minutes worth of footage which she had to cut down to an eight-minute video.
“I think some of the hardest parts were actually executing the documentary and trying to narrow down your topic. I would say that the hardest [part] was cutting down all of your footage into a small time window, cutting out parts that weren’t needed, but also having to sacrifice important parts of your film in order to fit the time constraint,” said Ngov.
Addington had his own struggles, but appreciated the things that worked really well. “I think the friendliness of the group members definitely made things easier and more fun to do, but I think we could’ve done better on time management,” he noted.
After nine weeks of work, the films were finished, and were shown to the class. “I was shocked seeing the improvement that has happened over the past two years. Seeing how much better I’ve gotten at filming and editing. I genuinely enjoyed the smile on my face when I saw my final project,” said FCHS senior Trevor Morris.
After the showing, Small selected the best ones to send to the Virginia High School League’s Film Festival. The films chosen were Matthew Gresham’s “Virginia is for Racing Lovers,” Morgan Drumheller’s “Love,” Connor Jeffries and Lane Harris’ “PSA – Sportsmanship,” and Camryn Ngov’s “ 半暝 Midnight.”
The finalists will be decided in late April, with the festival taking place on June 1. FlucoTV is registered in three categories, including Experimental (Drumheller), PSA (Jeffries-Harris), and Documentary (Gresham, Ngov).
“Finding out that my film was picked for the VHSL festival made me really happy and proud of myself for being able to put good enough work out into the world that my teacher would want to share it,” said Ngov. “It made me feel happy because I had worked really hard on my documentary and I think that the idea of someone liking my work made everything feel more real to me,” she added.
