Mini Doc- Alcoholism

This Mini Documentary is about the effects of Alcoholism. We discover how these people began drinking, when they noticed they had an addiction, when they decided to get help and finally what life is like being sober.

As far as a script or questions goes we had a fairly long list to begin with. Some questions we decided to scrape such as "when was the first time you were drunk and what was your reasoning?" because we either did not like the answer we received, or we did not feel that it went well with the other questions we had asked. We were also unable to ask questions about Alcoholics Anonymous due to privacy. The questions that we did have about AA however where, "What part of AA helped the most/" and "What is the hardest part of AA".

My production role in this process was art direction and editing. The director and cinematographer of the project was Sarah Pitts. Audio and coloring was done by Amelia Mamie. The thing about our group is that we never truly stick to our production roles. We do a little bit of everything to help each other as well as ourselves. For our cast, Sarah had connections with people and it made the process very easy. The people we interviewed, gave very honesty and real responses to our questions and were able to open up about their experiences.

I really enjoy working with both Sarah and Amelia because I feel we work well as a team. We have all become friends throughout our year working together and I feel that it helps when creating a project. It is good for our communication and collaboration that we all listen to each other and we all share all of the role within production. We just want to help each other wherever we can.

As for what I would do differently, I feel like that can all be done in the editing. I feel that it was a good documentary based on the fact of the responses we received. As for what I would do the same, I would most definitely work with this group again, if I ever got the chance. However, both Sarah and Amelia are seniors and I will not be able to work with them next year. I am sad that I will not get to work with them again, because they were great to work with and we became friends through all of our projects working together.

What I learned from this project is that, the connections you have, use them to your advantage. I also learned that, just because theres a set of guidelines for what types of shots that should be used or the kind of emotion you want in an actors voice, use your own ideas, you do not have to stay within the boundaries. Create something that you feel shows you as a person, not what a list of rules tells you how everything is supposed to be.