In our first two lessons of Act 5, we immediately dived into work. Our task is to create a 5-minute long documentary on the topic "Hangzhou Stories". Zhu Laoshi first showed us two documentaries made by previous years - one is about Grassroots and the other is about a Chinese Medicine Centre. As a class, we discussed what could be improved in the two films. For the first film, the framing / composition could be improved, and for the second one, the sound quality can be enhanced as there were a lot of background noises. The subtitles of both films are in white, and sometimes they cannot be read when they are put against a white background. This is something we should remember to consider in our documentary.
After half an hour of brainstorming as we went through many different possible topics like Mr. Karena, Boxing, China Internet Firewall, Greentown Student Gao Kao, we have decided that we would base our documentary on Irene's Beyond project. All three of us are interested in the letters she wrote that surrounds the topic of identity crisis, and we hope to portray her thoughts through a film.
We created a shot list and noted down some shots that we can include. Zhu Laoshi suggested us to use abstract shots in our film. Our next step is to ask Irene for the script that we need and afterwards begin filming shots that are relevant to the content.
