Production Log: Critique and Appraisal

Critique and Appraisal: At the time of this entry, you’ll have completed your interview. Now you need to reflect on what happened in terms of relevance, depth, and breadth, especially. Was there anything you didn’t expect? If so, how did you deal with that? Were you successful in extracting the type of commentary you were looking for? Why or why not? How do you now see this fitting into the documentary as a whole? Finally, you need to find and post footage from an interview, TV show, audio clip, or whatever (up to three minutes long) on your blog. Discuss how this footage will amplify or nuance the material you’ve collected already (and the documentary as a whole).
For the documentary, I interviewed two people: a freshman and a sophomore in order to cover the opinions of the two different grade levels of the Loft, which consists mainly of freshmen and sophomores; very few juniors and seniors spend their time there. The first interview I did was after the PSAT with a sophomore from the Loft. I tried to interview my first interviewee outside by the Science Center in order to give background on where he spent his free time at school, but this turned out to be a disaster. There was a lot of ambient noise. With the microphones on it was very difficult for me to concentrate on what he was saying and even what I was saying. Because of this, I could not expound on his thoughts and opinions about the subject. Outside, there were a lot of distractions that I had not anticipated. People would come and wave hello to the interviewee. Most of the time he would remember to ignore it, but once or twice he said hello or asked to be left alone on camera. Some people even walked in front of the camera and one person in particular was purposely trying to distract the interviewee. After the first interview catastrophe, I asked the first interviewee if I could interview him again, only this time in an empty Pauahi classroom afterschool. The interviewee's stereotype was being an Asian person - and therefore smart. I think that the classroom reflected that stereotype and contrasted with what he was talking about well. There was a bit of ambient noise due to the air conditioning in the room, but it was trivial compared to the noise in the first interview. It was much quieter, and there were no distractions caused by wandering students. During the second interview, with the mere change of location, I felt that the quality of the interview greatly improved. We were able to go more into depth about the different social groups and what it meant to be a part of that group. I learned a lot about it for example, I never knew that there was a K-town group at Punahou. He talked about people who had openly told him that they thought he was strange. I also got the opportunity to talk about his friends at his former school and learned that they hadn't changed toward him at all for coming to Punahou, but that it was a matter of just growing apart. This was very different from the stories I had heard about friends breaking apart because of the Punahou stereotype. For the third interview, I interviewed a freshman girl from the Loft. I interviewed her in the upstairs chemistry room, which is extremely close to the Loft. Fortunately I found this to be a good spot for interviewing as well because there were no wandering students and little ambient noise. Over the course of this interview, I got an opinion of stereotypes from a girl who had been attending Punahou for her entire academic career so far. She had lived with the stereotype for most of her life, and said that she tries to fight the opinions of those who think Punahou is just full of rich snobs. She even mentioned some of the more insulting stereotypes that people use subconsiously. Throughout these interviews, I felt very priveledged to get points of view from people on a somewhat controversial subject. I regret, however, that I hadn't talked about the grade-level stereotypes. What I was pleased to hear from both of these people was that they accepted who they were as people, despite the fact that some people think they are weird, and that they didn't feel that they had to change to suit others. These two people displayed a lot of inner strength that I think that others can look up to. I see these interviews as just another social group in the sea of social groups at the Academy or as an end note on self-acceptance.
Unfortunately, I could not attach an audio clip to my blog, but I do have a song in mind for the documentary. The song is We Can Work it Out by the Beatles. It is a song about cooaperating and remaining united despite contrasting opinions and beliefs. I think it would fit well with the contrasting opinions and beliefs that we encounter on the interviews about stereotypes.