Documentary Project Assignment

This project asks you to apply the work of the first part of the course toward creating your own documentary work in the digital space of Macromedia Flash MX 2004.  This documentary project will be about a topic that enhances your own understanding of your subject as well as contributing to your audience’s knowledge and understanding. You will conduct  "research" (fact-finding, conducting interviews, seeking out original photographs and film clips, re-creating situations and environments, manipulating texts and images) which will enable you to create a documentary that adopts an angle that is new, interesting, and refreshing to your audience. 

Here is what you will do:

• You will conduct "research" that consists of conventional library and online research plus artifact finding, interviews, observations, original photography, film clips, etc.  This research will become the essence of your project.  Your goal is to end up with much more material than you will use in the final project.  

• Your project must include “original” documented material, including one or more of the following:
• original photographs and/or created images
• interviews with key players in the story you are telling;  the texts from these interviews (direct quotations and paraphrases) would be incorporated extensively into your project. 
• a significant amount of original written text generated by you.  This text should be carefully and purposefully crafted. 

• The final project must be in a form that can be “distributed” to an audience – a web site, a CD, a floppy disk.

• Your project must conclude with a short reflection that discusses your process of creating this text.  This should enhance your audience’s understanding of the project as well as help my assessment of your project. This reflection need not be a part of the actual documentary, although it could be.  It can exist as a separate, reflective text.  You will receive more direction on this part of the assignment later in the quarter. 

• Collaborative projects (two students per team) are encouraged but not required.  Except in extreme cases, both students will receive the same grades on all elements of the project.

Choosing a Topic

The object of this assignment is for you to learn, and then teach.  Therefore you will choose a topic that you would like to learn more about, that you are willing to invest time and intellectual energy in.  Your topic should be “available to rhetoric”; that is, you should be able to influence thought and/or action through documenting it. For topic suggestions, check the link to Documentary Topics on the course web site.

Timeline