C-SPAN Documentary

Politician's Contest from nickscap2016 on Vimeo.

Assignment/Activity Title— C-SPAN Documentary

Year— Sophomore

Skill— Media

Portfolio Category— Media & Communication           

This project was for T.V. Studios, and had a pretty straightforward objective: to create a documentary (seven minutes or less) on a topic under the overarching theme of an issue Congress should address in 2014. Now, because of visits to Blair from Representative Pete Visclosky and Maryland Majority Whip Jamie Raskin, Neida and Julian had the idea to focus on Congress itself. Our Congress currently has the lowest approval rates ever in its history, and part of the reason is because of its inability to compromise.

            The biggest struggle during this project was the group dynamics. Although at the beginning we all contributed to the research, that soon disintegrated – Neida conducted the interview, transcribed it, and outlined our script. I wrote the script, found all of the B-Roll, recorded the narration, and edited the entire script. Julian and Anna did seemingly nothing, and since C-SPAN only allows groups of three maximum we had to leave one of them off the credits. At first it was Anna, since Julian had the idea for the project and did a decent amount of research. Towards the end, though, Anna started coming in and editing a little as well as filling out works cited and other paperwork. So with Julian nowhere to be seen, we took his name off the credits and put Anna’s up.
 

The second struggle here was time. We had only a couple weeks to conduct the interview, do all the prep work, and create the documentary. However, by putting in extra time (mostly me and Neida), we managed to create a polished and informative documentary entitled Politician’s Contest, and get it submitted in time for the project.

I put this under media and communications because it helped me develop my storytelling skills in a shorter period of time. To make everything fit into seven minutes was a challenge, especially without making it sound extremely technical or overload the audience with information.