Art Heals the Soul - Documentary - 2024 - ID# 334
South Elgin
Documentary
Entry Description
A short documentary about a broken childhood and a career change that sends a middle aged woman back to art which not only helps heal her emotionally, but others, too.
Copyright Info
Recent Teacher Comments
- 4/24 9:08 pm - Great opening - the sound bites pull you right in as a strong cold open. It's clear right away that there's fluid editing and a great story to be told. After the opening, the editing does start to speed up a little bit like you're in a bit of a rush. As far as the sound design is concerned, more natural sound would make the piece come alive and I also think that including at least one to two more music tracks to change the mood and shape the narrative structure would have been better than one dominant track throughout the entire piece. That said this is a strong bio, but as we see frequently in many student pieces, simple bios should have more than one voice or interview on most occasions.
- 4/3 9:35 pm - Keepers: Really nice interview set ups. Good work with the 2 cameras and the background is really nice. Great look. Improvements: The documentary has two main issues. Number 1, you need another voice to round out this documentary. A family member, an art instructor, someone who knows her that can speak to her growth and journey of self discovery. The second issue is that you don't have any natural sound in this piece. Natural sound and reality footage of Kathy working, painting, interacting with people provides you with additional perspectives, and gets away from the singular voice of the story (the talking head interview). Let me hear her paint outside, let me hear her interact as a social worker. Having those elements is so important to make the story more vibrant - especially if you only have a single interview. In regard to editing, leave your still photos on screen longer and slow the scaling effects down a bit. Also, use more songs in this piece. You should have about 3 for this piece. Change the song as the major beats of the story change. One song at the beginning, another song when she rediscovers art through her daughter and then another hopeful tune at the end when she talks about her motivations as an artist. Overall, this is a nice visual piece. Keep working, developing and improving!
- 3/4 6:10 pm - +Nice shooting, interview looks nice. I like how you put her artwork in the back of the interview shot +Good work getting a lot of different b-roll -It would be best to have 1-2 more interviews. That way, the other interviewees can speak about your main interviewee -You do not need the dissolves, they can be cuts to match the rest of the cut transitions in your doc.
Judge 1
Positives: Great job getting all of the pictures and capturing your subject painting etc. Good message
Improvements: I would have loved to have heard from your subject's husband and daughter about her decision and the inspiration they felt about her decision.
Judge 2
Positives: 1. Extremely good use of broll/cutaways/archive media to support her story. The "show me don't tell me" technique is really well done. 2. Well constructed edit from the interview you conducted.
Improvements: 1. Could leave some breathing room in the edit for some of the broll/archive media. You have so many good visuals and if you left some room between some of the VO it would let the viewer reflect/feel the anecdotes through the video more. 2. Maybe stick to just one camera angle during the interviews, feels a bit jarring at times.
Judge 3
Positives: Sound was great, watched on my tv with a 5.1 speaker setup and this sounds like a professional movie that has a whole sound department. Good job. Camera & lighting was also very well done. Kathy was a sweetheart with a great message and the composition of her outside or shots of her art work are very well shot, the lighting also looked great a lot of color popping from her and had a very pleasant time watching the shots of the world around her.
Improvements: The editor needs to put in credits, even if no one cares put in credits. I loved the use of B-Roll but you could have edited it so when she is not in camera you can cut the audio of her filler words. Also seemed very quick you could pace out and chop up her sentences, and spread it so she takes her time talking more while b-roll is shown. I think pacing could have improved I know 5 minutes isn’t a ton of time but use all 5 if you have too and I think you had to with this one.
Judge 4
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Judge 5
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