Amy’s Notes
Three students in my Spring 2010 section of WRTG 3020 made this mini-documentary, which gave them the chance to explore how a bunch of college guys think and talk about gender and sexuality. They started out simply being curious to see what their friends and acquaintances would say, but they ended up discovering an interesting pattern in their responses.
The students did a great job of editing the clips together, given that they’d never done this kind of composition before — and it’s worth noting that the video is very much “composed,” meaning that the students put a lot of thought into how to trim each clip, which clips to include for each section, and what order to put them in, in order to strengthen their overall message.
For that matter, the students were thinking about composition even in the process of shooting the footage, by placing each subject so that his face appeared in the upper left or upper right corner of the screen, thus following the “rule of thirds.” Notice also that most subjects are looking at the interviewer, not at the camera. They also chose to shoot in a variety of settings and from a variety of angles.
However, if we had to do it over again, I’d ask them to try and trim the video down to under 10 minutes, just to make sure they keep viewers’ attention all the way to the end.