CCR (not the band)

     Does This Make You Uncomfortable? is our documentary that was created to show how gen-z is made uncomfortable by feet, and what that shows about society. 

    The first step to learning about how to make a documentary was viewing some examples, and understanding some of the conventions that can be found. The first example we viewed in class was called I Think this is the Closest to How the Footage Looked. This short nine-minute piece was really vital in expanding our view of what a documentary can be. As was explained to us, a documentary is a “slice of life”, and this piece was a perfect way to show that. After this, we saw the piece Exit Through the Gift Shop. This was without a doubt the most influential piece we viewed when it came to the style of our own documentary. Due to our topic being out of the ordinary, we decided that a more lighthearted style, similar to the style of Exit Through the Gift Shop, would be important to get audiences to understand what we were showing. Something else we were inspired by from this doc was the use of interviewing the creators to progress through the piece, in order to explain to the audience what is happening, as well as using it to help maintain the structure. The final examples we watched in class were the New York Times Op Docs. These were extremely helpful for us, as they were really the only examples that were a similar runtime to what we were aiming for. 

The topic that we were covering is quite a specific one that most people likely wouldn’t understand. A lot of adults we talked to during this project had no clue that people in generation z even have a problem with feet. Due to this, the main target audience for this piece is other people in generation z, as they already understand the topic at hand. The topic seems to tailor towards all genders, as most people seem to have the same discomfort around feet. The documentary tailored towards our target audience by also starting out pretty fast paced, which is helpful towards gen z, who normally have a lower attention span. I think if we were able to add more of our own interviews, potentially explaining how we originally came up with this topic, and explaining that it is a generation-wide issue, we could have expanded the audience to a much larger level. 

This piece is something that most people in generation z can actually relate to. During the class viewing of our documentary, most of the class was laughing at so many of the moments, likely because they relate to it so much. Also, during a scene where a foot is shown, the entire class started freaking out, obviously pretty uncomfortable with what was shown on-screen, clearly proving that the topic does make them uncomfortable. 

One of the ways that we developed a brand in the piece was with the very title of the piece itself: Does This Make You Uncomfortable? That was the question that we asked all of our man on the streets interviewees, as well as the first question for all of our main interviewees. Because of this, we were able to use the title as a guiding question within the majority of the piece, and it stayed a recurring theme throughout the whole thing. Another way we developed the brand was by, for lack of better words, the way we kept things pretty out of pocket for most of the piece. This documentary is on an admittedly pretty strange topic, so going right out there and embracing it ended up being an effective choice. Right off the bat, we show a video of a foot up close, which most people in our target audience would never dream of doing. We then walked around town showing people pictures of feet. This is once again something our target audience would find absurd, proven by the fact that people who knew what we were doing beforehand were shocked we would even try such a thing. At a later point in the piece, one of our interviewees ripped off his shoes and socks, and we zoomed in to capture the absurdity that our audience would find. 

One of the main social issues that our documentary tackled was the trend for people in generation z to tend to cover up a lot more. Several of our interviewers were able to explain several other examples of younger people covering up, besides just with their feet. People in our target audience viewing the piece, who likely cover up their feet subconsciously, could question the reason for why they do so. I feel that we could have done this a bit more effectively if we were able to have our own interviews placed throughout the entire documentary, besides just the beginning. This way, we would be able to explain how what the interviewers are saying relate to the topic, as well as reaching a broader point of view of society itself. This piece most covers the group of gen-z, and it attempts to point out deeper reasons for some of their actions, ones that they may not expect. 

With Does This Make You Uncomfortable?, the main goal was to use a funny and humorous beginning to draw members of gen-z in, before switching to a more serious a reflective topic, one that viewers can use to reflect upon some aspects of society. 

editing

     So where did we leave off.. oh yes. Two days to edit. Now this definitely was not a good thing, although I wouldn't say we necessarily had a choice. We got out last interview the day before, and we wanted to have all the interviews gathered before we started constructing the line edit. In order to go through the interviews easier, we made a document with all of the interview transcriptions. 

    Here they are, it's a beaut ain't it?: transcript

    All the interviews together were just about two hours, and at font size 11 the transcripts took up 25 pages. Geez, this is a lot. Editing interviews for a documentary is very similar to editing for a news story, which I was used too. News stories generally have two interviews, so I was expecting our six to take three to four times as long. Ha. So it turns out the time to edit interviews together increases exponentially the more you have. 

    We decided that the best way to add structure to the story and move it along would be to use interviews of ourselves to talk about what is happening on screen, much in a similar way to Banksy's interviews in Exit Through the Gift Shop. 

    The big problem with this was finding time to film. We're seniors in high school. We're busy. First of all, Dani is a band kid. No offense, but "band kid" and "having lives" are not in the same sentence. Vic is a chorus and drama kid, which both had a bunch of stuff going on at this time. I'm a tv kid, which means I also had a bunch of stuff going on. Vic and I also both had a big calc test coming up. Basically, time was something we did not have. 

    

    The main goal was to watch the line edit, then fill in the spots with written out lines for our interview. However, since the line edit was not done, and we didn't have time to meet up, we recorded our own interviews, without seeing the footage we were adding it too. This was what I think ended up being the biggest flaw with out piece, as I think having our interviews scattered throughout the piece would have made audiences understand what was happening way better. 

    Either way, it was the afternoon the project was due, so there was no time to complain. I worked on putting together all of the interviews(with some help from Dani), while Vic worked on editing the mots and the intro. Vic was actually able to use her own interview a lot in the first part, and it was obvious that it works well, we just didn't have our own interviews that fit within the main interview section of the piece. 

    

Here is the timeline when I was done. The selected part was the final doc.

    Vic then took the interviews and added it to her section, which she somehow edited on her phone. The sun was very much in the sky by the time it was complete. 

    The final product was a little over 13 minutes long, which is longer than we initially intended, but we were all very proud of how it came out. This documentary is still very much not done in our eyes. We see so much potential that we can add to this project, and we plan on fixing all of our mistakes in the future. 

    Here is what we ended up submitting, Does This Make You Uncomfortable? , I will eventually post the new and improved doc here, but this is what we have for now.

    So yeah. That's how I ended up watching my English teacher show us his toes. Life is crazy.

This is Where the Fun Begins...

Berna's Interview

    

    The very first interview we got was Mr. Berna, my English teacher, who also has a degree in psych. I knew he was the right choice as soon as I asked him to do the interview. I happened to be filming when I asked him, take a look at this response: 

    He said right afterwards that he had noticed kids were weird with feet, and gave an anecdote about a time he wore sandals to class, and got some extreme reactions. I had him tell us the same story during our actual interview, which was the day after this. 

    Berna gave an amazing interview. He is what I would describe as a chronic yapper, because he can talk about a topic for literally an entire class period (we don't get much done in class), but that lead to him giving us some interesting perspectives and some interesting theories. He related gen-z and how they hide feet with how most kids don't go to the pool without a shirt on anymore, and a whole trend of covering up.    

    We made a little blog right after, and you can see we were pretty excited. This was really our first sign that this crazy idea may somehow actually work out..  

    

The Mots

    This is the thing we were most scared about. Mostly because it meant we would be walking around our city center, where we know a LOT of people, and going up to strangers to show them a picture of feet. We decided we would just ask them two questions: 

    -Does this make you uncomfortable? Why?(omg it's also the title isn't that cool)

    -Do you have any opinions on feet?

Here is the pic we used.

    To film the MOTS, I checked out some equipment from my tv club. I got a camera and a really cool wireless handheld mic. 

    Our MOTS interviews actually came out so well. Like we could not have asked for a better outcome. We were planning on editing it to show only adults who have no issues with feet, and only teens who had issues with feet. Creator bias? Maybe. Well we didn't have to do that. Because EVERY. SINGLE. INTERVIEW. WAS. PERFECT. Literally not a single adult had any issues with feet. In fact, a good portion of them thought if we were asking if the position the feet were in was an uncomfortable position. Then literally every gen-z we asked were genuinely so weirded out, and the pic did in fact make them uncomfortable. We ended up using every single interview in our mots (besides the people who answered in Spanish).  We are literally immune to creator bias (obviously a joke but still).

    It seemed too good to be true. Because it was. Obviously. Remember that fancy wireless mic we used? Well it connects to the camera with an aux cable. Aux cables are notorious for being glitchy, as well as anything wireless. So before we went shooting, I checked to make sure everything sounded fine. Of course, when we got to location, I used the other aux cable in the case that I didn't test by mistake. I got home to see the audio was literally unusable. Completely unsalvageable. Screw you murphy and your stupid law. And yes, I did use headphones. Sounded fine through them. 

    Luckily, when we filmed the MOTS, Dani also filmed with her camcorder. The reason was just because we thought it could be a cool aesthetic, and also two angles could be a good idea. For some reason, Dani's cheap and years old camcorder has literally the most amazing mic in the history of the planet. That may seem like hyperbole, but it literally picked up what people were saying from like 15 feet(haha feet) away. Of course there was a lot of background noise, but it was more than usable. If I ever win an Oscar or Emmy, I'm, thanking that camcorder in my acceptance speech. 

Kanno's Interview

    Mr. Kanno, the sociology teacher, was one of the more interesting points of view we got. He had no idea that people found feet weird, but after learning it was a gen-z thing, he related them to pimple patches that he sees a lot of students wearing. It was very interesting that both Kanno and Berna talked about other examples of covering up with gen-z, and it was a point we definitely wanted to include in the final piece. 

The Rest of the Interviews

    The rest of the interviews consisted of Vic's friend(who hates feet) and her younger sister, our friend Thalia, and a guy named Luke we know. All of those interviews went pretty smoothly, all giving their perspectives. We didn't end up using Ceci's sister, just because she wasn't the best interview (not her fault she was like 11). We never got to interview the AP Pysch teacher at our school, mostly due to a lack of time and none of us were really close with her, but we were pretty happy with all of the interviews we got.

    And just like that we were pretty much done filming. Small thing. Just a teeny little thing. Getting all of that took about 12 days. We had two weeks to work on the project. Which means we had two days to edit together all of that footage. Should be fun. 

planning

Hi. My name is Zach. That is my English teacher. Showing us his toes. You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation. To understand how we got here, we must go to the very beginning...

How Did We Get Here?

    October 2nd, 2024. The time is somewhere between 9:17 and 10:57am on a peaceful Wednesday morning at Cypress Bay High School. Our AICE Media teacher, Mrs. Stoklosa, was giving us our first lesson on documentaries. Here we are, learning all of the basics about documentaries, when Stoklosa stops and says, "Hold on guys. This isn't related to anything but... do you guys have a problem with feet?". I'm roughly paraphrasing here, but our teacher definitely got her answer as the class literally erupted with a wave of grossed-out teenagers who most definitely had a problem with feet. 

    

    Stoklosa was utterly confounded about why pretty much all of her students had an issue with feet. Understandably so, because in the end feet are just body parts, and there's literally nothing explicit about them. As the members of our class tried explaining how feet are gross and weird looking, our teacher just couldn't seem to wrap her head around feet being such a, for lack of a better term, "taboo" thing for teenagers. 

    The very strange thing was that even us, the toe-hating teenagers, were unable to come up for any explanation for why we are so grossed out by our bottom-most body part. This lead to, without exaggeration, a very heated debate on possible explanations for this phenomenon. My friend Victoria was especially interested in this debate. She said that she found it so fascinating how an entire group of people can turn such an ordinary thing into something to avoid. I saw Vic was so obviously captivated by this, and me, being the naturally hilarious person that am I, said as joke "You should make a documentary on this." The class laughed at my vey funny and humorous comment. Expect for Vic. Who took me completely seriously. 

Her words, not mine.

    Vic literally took out her notebook and started writing down ideas for how she could possibly do this doc. I started suggesting some ideas of my own, and before we knew it we had a very rough plan for how it could possibly happen. Obviously we would never do that though, it's such a weird idea. I remember thinking to myself, "I wonder if Vic will actually do that idea. If she does, there's no way in hell I'm helping her". 

    Flash forward to the day the project is assigned. My friend Daniella and I are a little unsure of what we would want to make our documentary on. Then we make the mistake of locking eyes with Victoria. We looked back at the notes that were written down. The more we talked about it , the more ideas that were surprisingly good we came up with. Then Stoklosa literally said out loud, "I will be so sad if no one makes the foot documentary". Welp, since she was literally begging us, we really had no choice but to make it. (Stoklosa would later claim that she was joking, but I refuse to believe that. The look of excitement on her face when we decided our topic showed us everything).

Research on the Topic

    The first and arguably most important step of the pre-production is researching about your topic. It was in this stage, however, when I noticed that this documentary might be more interesting that I first thought. It was a pretty well-documented topic,(our teacher first discovered it in a John Oliver segment), and we were able to find plenty of articles explaining the weird phenomenon that was younger people's disgust towards feet. We found a variety of articles explaining that this is a widespread thing. From all of our research online (and independent studies, more on that later), it seemed that disgust towards feet was primarily a gen-z issue. 

    Some articles we used that gave us some interesting points of view. A HuffPost article said that many people in younger generations consciously avoid wearing open-toed shoes in public. It said that even younger brides getting married refuse to wear open-toed shoes, in fear of having their feet in photos. 

    A few of the articles that we found suggested that one of the possible reasons for gen-z's adversity to feet is our generation's awareness of the fairly new ability for anyone to sell their feet pics online. Believe it or not, people can make some genuinely good money online selling pictures of their feet on the internet. The theory is that gen-z is aware that people could fetishize their feet, and so teenagers prefer to hide their feet from that possibility. 

     A really interesting statistic we found was from an interesting website, FeetFinder. It's apparently one of the most popular websites to find pictures of feet. Their data shows that gen-z has the highest level of foot fetishes compared to every other generation, which is a little strange since it's the generation that appears to hate feet the most. 

    Here's the thing...

    That isn't a bad theory at all. We thought that that was going to be our conclusion for the documentary. That was until we started asking people in our class why they individually felt uncomfortable about feet, and not a single person stated that as being the cause. There were a variety of different reasons people told us, but it was still strange We realized that there is some different reason that was causing an entire generation to dislike feet, and there is absolutely no awareness of it...

Planning for the Doc

    We decided that the overall route that we wanted to take was to start with showcasing how gen-z's aversion to feet was in fact a big thing. We thought a really cool way to show this would be a Man On The Streets. By asking a bunch of different people, we could get a variety of ages that would hopefully showcase how it is only a gen-z issue. This would mean we would have to go around our town showing random people pictures of feet and getting their opinions on it, but the fact that that scared us so badly shows how weird gen-z is.

    After showcasing it was a thing, we would then transition to what gen-z's dislike of feet shows about society and societal norms, as we believed that is the real message people could take away from this. We made up a list of a few different people, ranging from teachers with degrees in sociology and psychology to tell us their theories about it, and members of g-zen to explain their disliking of feet.

    We decided that the piece should end off having the audience thinking about society and their own lives, possibly wondering what trends they might be unknowingly following. 

    Most importantly, we decided on the title: "Does This Make You Uncomfortable?". This I actually came up with on the very first day we joked about making this doc, because I think it would make such a good poster/title screen if shown with a picture of feet.

Here is our planning sheet:

    Now that we had a concrete plan and structure, it was time to see if we could actually pull it off...

    

Documentary Research

    Welcome to the first part in the trilogy + 1 of posts(which is apparently called a tetralogy) which I will be making about the documentary project we have recently finished working on. 

The Research

I Think This is the Closest to How the Footage Looked (2012)

    I Think This is the Closest to How the Footage Looked was first documentary we viewed in class as we started our unit on documentaries. This film completely changed my views on what documentaries could be. If you had showed this piece to me before, I wouldn't had even called it a documentary. Before I had the impression that all documentaries were long informative pieces with interviews that tell you about a topic, but that's obviously not true. As we were told in class, a documentary is something that illustrates a "slice of life". They can take on so many different shapes and forms, and it got me really excited for this project. 

    If you haven't watched this piece, stop reading right now and go watch it here.

    This short little nine minute documentary is absolutely soul crushing, and it perfectly shows how a documentary is just a "slice of life". 

American Promise (2013)

    American Promise was the first actual full length documentary we watched, with a runtime of almost two and a half hours compared to the nine minutes of the first one. This was much more of the typical kind of documentary you would expect, showing the life of two boys from the first grade all the way to college. That's right, the documentary spanned the entirety of their time at school and it took over 13 years to create. 

    

    This documentary is about the lives of two African American boys going to one of the most prestigious preparatory schools in the country. The New York school is predominantly white, and the two subjects were given scholarships, as long as they maintain their grades. 
    

    The piece does a masterful job on the aspect of editing, they had well over 800 hours of footage, and they needed to figure out how to turn 13 years of their own children's lives into just two and a half hours. I can't imagine how hard this must have been, as I struggled with cutting out footage with my documentary, and I only had about an hour and a half of interview footage. 

    This documentary did an amazing job of showing different aspects of the subjects' lives. The main focus was about the effect of being some of the only African Americans in the mostly white school, However, it went into a lot of the details of their lives at home, and I actually found myself relating to a lot of it. I thought one of the most interesting aspects shown in this piece was how strict the parents were in how much control they had over their kid's schoolwork. One family had so much involvement that they had literally scheduled out his life down to the minute. Another family was less involved, going with more of a "Go do your homework" approach. 

    

    Both kids struggled a lot while at the prep school, and one of the kids, the one who's parents were less strict, ending up dropping out and going to a public school. The kid that remained at the prep school was aiming for all these highly esteemed colleges such as Stanford, while the other was reaching for less prominent colleges. The kid who was aiming for Stanford only made it into his safety schools, while the other kid made it into his top options. I thought it was interesting how both kid made it into schools of relatively same level, despite the differences in how strict the parents were.

    

    In the end, both kids were happy with where they ended up, and it helped relieve a little stress about what I was currently going through, as I related to the struggle a lot.

Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)

    By far my favorite documentary we watched in class(and probably my favorite I've ever seen) was Exit Through the Gift Shop. This really surprised me, as it is about street art, a topic I've never really cared too much for, but I think it shows that the topic in a documentary isn't as important as what you do with it. Seriously, I went to go watch the first minute of the film just to remember how it started, and next thing I knew it was twenty minutes later and I was like "Oh wait I'm supposed to be blogging".

    

    It was directed by Banksy, one of the most famous street artists today, and it follows a man named Thierry Guetta, who carries a camera and films everything wherever he goes. He eventually starts becoming fascinated by the world of street art, so he starts devoting his time to filming that. 

    

    That's how the piece starts. The focus of the film completely shifts part of the way through, and takes you on a journey you would never expect. I not going to discuss much of the content here, mostly because this is the sort of thing that you just need to sit down and watch yourself. 

    

    After finishing this documentary in class, we spent about half an hour in what became an almost heated discussion on the question that the film poses, which is "What is art?". People may think that is an obvious kind of question to pose in the world of street art, but what the question is actually asking about is way different from what you're probably thinking. 

    I really fell in love with the style of this documentary, which I think is kind of clear once you view our own doc. It carries such a raw style, and you can tell that it ended off in a completely different way than it was first intended. We really loved the way that the story was told in this piece, and we adopted a similar style, which you will soon learn about. 

As I was writing this blog, I ran into this cat. I've decided to name it Thierry, in honor of Exit Through the Gift Shop.

Abstract: The Art of Design (2017)

    

    Abstract was the example we watched that was an episodic documentary. I'm going to be honest, I didn't love this piece. I'm not really knocking it in anyway, because I think it achieved what it was going for very well, I'm just not the biggest fan of the style. 

    

    I think it has a lot to do with the fact that this was pretty much a 40 minute human interest story each episode. As part of being a in TV Production, I already view and make quite a few of these, so it just didn't feel as unique or special to me. I really enjoyed how most of the other docs we viewed all seemed so unique, so this one didn't leave as much as a mark on me. 

    That being said, the episodes we watched were still very well made. My favorite was the episode on Ruth Carter, who is a costume designer of legendary status. I recognized so much of her work that they showed, and the fact that I had no idea it was all by the same person is honestly a crime. 

    

    Because the entire purpose of the series is on artists and designers, most of the b-roll needed to be staged. Our documentary's b-roll also needed to be staged, so this served as a very good example of how to stage b-roll, and looking back I think we should have taken some more inspiration. 

New York Times Op-Docs

    The New York Times has a place called Op-Docs, where independent filmmakers can submit their own short documentaries, and we each viewed two different ones in class. 

    

    The first one I viewed was called Pickle. It told the story of a couple that takes care of all sorts of animals. Many of the animals are, well, weird, and others have some disabilities that no one else would want to care for. 

    This was another piece that needed a lot of staged b-roll, since so many of the animals they talked about were no longer around. This doc was really creative with some of its b-roll, even using little animations to show how the animals passed away. 

    I thought this documentary was really sweet. It had such a lighthearted tone and I liked the message it had about life and helping animals. It also had two different interviews that it had react with each other, and I used this very technique in our own doc.

    The second one I watched was Roaches' Lullaby, and it was one of the coolest and definitely strangest doc I've ever seen. It interviews three different ordinary people in New York City as they talk about their roach infestations. Aside from just normal sit-downs, it follows the people around their homes as they explain their roach-killing routine. 

    The thing that makes this so cool is the fact that this was made in 1972. It feels like a little time capsule, taking us right back to 1970s New York City. You can tell people back then were... a little less sanitary, but really they were just the same as us: people who hate roaches. Honestly, this piece feels like something way weirder than you would expect from this time, and I think that's one of the reasons I really liked it. 

    The interviews in the documentary shift from talking about how they kill roaches, to how they hate roaches, to then asking the question, "Are humans the roaches of the universe?", which was a moment of existentiality I wasn't expecting. And yes, there is an actual lullaby about roaches included.

    I really did go on and on about these docs that I watched, to the point that people saw how much I had written and gave me really judging looks. I think that fact that these documentaries can drive people to have so many thoughts and opinions on different topics is what I found most interesting about this unit, and I think it was a driving factor on the topic we ended up choosing for our own doc, which I cannot wait to get into in the next post. 

complete and total makeover

This blog was in desperate need of a rebranding, and so rebranding I did. 

The biggest difference: it looks less ugly now!!!

I spent a bit of time redesigning the theme for the blog itself. In doing this I remembered why the original blog looked the way it did: you can't use any of the good themes :D! I'm not sure if it's for Cambridge or just my teacher's preference, but you need to be able to scroll through the blog without clicking to open individual posts. However, Google Blogger decided to make all of the good themes so that you must open each blog individually. It feels like a personal attack from Google personally, but either way it severally limited choices for design. However, I think the new look is still a significant improvement, so I'm happy. 

Here is the original look:

And here is the new loo- wait...

Yes, I was about to insert a screenshot of the new look of the blog, without realizing that if you're reading this, you're already looking at the new blog... Anyway, I decided to keep the same background because I've grown kind of attached to it.

The new name, "Long Gone Geek", has a very special and important reason for me naming it that: it sounds kind of cool. I mean you may not think so, but I think if you asked a thousand people which name is better they would pick the new one. The title also happens to be the name of a super deep cut song from the English rock band Procol Harum. This is actually strategical. I'm hoping that since the graders of this exam are most likely British, they will somehow recognize the reference and give me a better score. 

Anyway, now that the blog looks a bit better, you can expect some blogs with some actual informative content in the very near future... 

I'M BAAAAAAACK

 

I know that everyone is very happy for the return of their very favorite blog. A lot has happened since I've last posted... but I won't bore you with all of that, so here's a quick little update. My name is still Zach. I am a year older. I am now in AICE Media Studies A Level, I've been loving the class so far, and I can't wait to get started on this year's portfolio project. 

I have some plans for this blog for the upcoming rest of the year. Close followers of my blog may have noticed how it became slowly more and more unhinged as the year went by. To prevent this, I have decided it will be unhinged from the very beginning, for consistency purposes. I have also decided that it's about time I update how the blog looks, because it's a teeny bit hideous at the current moment and I'm not very happy about that. I believe that all three of my loyal followers deserve to look at something somewhat visually pleasing, so this one's for you guys. I also think I should change the name, because in all honestly "Zach's Film Zone" didn't have much thought put into it. So basically, we're going through a complete rebranding for this blog, all very exciting stuff. 

Once again, I'm super excited for this year near of Media Studies(A Level Edition!!!). I have no clue where this year will take me, but since I just finished making a documentary on FEET of all things, I'm sure it will be interesting...