Documentary Reflection

My group's documentary focuses on what role the internet plays in the music industries for artists, record producers, and the fans. This topic interests me a lot because a large part of my life revolves around playing and listening to music. I love that Mr. Mayo gave us the freedom to select our own topics, but I think that the freedom of selection might have made some topics to unrefined. Looking back on the project there were some bright spots, but also some pretty bad ones. I am glad that I had this experience, but also slightly upset about how it ended up.
At first my group and I decided to do something about the evolution of music, due in part to the internet. Then our topic slightly changed and we wanted to focus a lot on how artists and record producers use the internet. Then finally, after all of our interviews, we decided to focus solely on the internet's effect on musicians, record producers, and fans. We were able to interview some very important people for this project. We interviewed Kip Berman on the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Ian McKaye the operator of Dischord Records and a member of bands like Fugazi and Minor Threat, and Sean Peoples the former owner of Sockets Records.

The problem with the interviews is that since our topic slightly changed a lot we weren't able to get the best information out of our interviews. Still, the planning part of the project was my favorite part. I loved being able to meet and talk with this people about music. I have seen the Pains of Being Pure at Heart live and it was an unbelievable experience to talk with Kip.
After we put our interviews onto the computer things got bad. We didn't have any real direction to go in, and spent many classes watching interviews over and over again, just trying to figure out what to do about the project. Eventually we kind of laid out what we had, but it didn't flow at all, and Mr. Mayo called us out on it. It was disappointing to be called out, but it needed to happen if we were going to make anything of substance at all. We took Mr. Mayo's feedback and were able to make something with it. Mr. Mayo hasn't watched it yet, but it is a thousand times better than it use to be.
Looking back on the project I feel one major issue needs to be addressed. Next time I would recommend that there be more set deadlines. There was suppose to be a rough cut due sometime back, but Mr. Mayo never asked us to look at our rough cut, which is good because we really had nothing. Without scriter deadlines we were able to slack off a bit and not focus hard on trying to create a solid documentary. If I had to do it all over again, I would have worked a lot harder to try and create a rough cut, then tighten it up, and finally create a good final product that I can be proud of. This project was an interesting experience for me and I gained a lot of knowledge from it. I am excited to use the experiences from this project in future. I know now to pre-plan well, and don't get discouraged if interviews don't work out as well as I thought they would. All in all, I enjoyed this project and was able to work on a topic I find interesting for three months, I can't ask for much more than that.