Progress report- A bees project.

Five hours before my AA flight back to Taiwan, I’m still sitting in front of iMAC editing the last part of my project. Looking at all the tiny clips hanging up in the timeline, I can’t stop thinking of every moment I spent with the subjects and filming them. It’s a training of my storytelling ability, yet it’s also a journey to reach people and the community that need to be heard in this world. That’s what a journalist should do, and that’s why I’m sitting down here.

I was absent in our last class because I was interviewing with a bees expert. That went pretty well because Simone turned out to be a doctoral student at UT and has a lot of working experiences with native bees in Brazil. Her research topic is solitary bees which means they don’t have a colony and don't produce honey(they don’t have queens). I was so glad that I met her because I learned a lot from her. For example, there are 90% of bees don’t produce honey. A kind of bees love to lick the sweat from human being. However, I know that the more information I got from her, the more dilemmas I would have met when it comes to editing.

There are some weakness of my final project that I could have done better if I went over it again.

At the very first beginning of my work, I was gonna make a bees documentary related to the drought. So basically the interview questions were almost around this topic and I didn’t come up anything else. Both of Joe and Taylor answered the question like that and none of them could be able to “show” me the affect that drought had made. And it wasn’t until the mid of semester that I realized that: 1. Documentary is supposed to document something that is GOING ON, not something has been passed. 2. Because it rained a lot at the end of last year, beekeepers harvest much more honey than last year, so my original idea of bees project looks like a joke at that point.

Also, I should’ve made a clear storyline before I started to do it. We’ve done treatment assignment at the early of this semester but mine had nothing to do with bees whatsoever. Gradually I realized that I can't ask the same questions each time I interviewed with them. The change of mindset worked a little bit when I interviewed with the bees expert, but things are already too late. I can’t start to make my story until I collect all the clips, or the documentary would be so lack of story spine and fragmentary. Even if I have many good close-up shots, story line is what matters to
make a documentary piece completed.

And I was supposed to be prepared myself well enough technically when it comes to making documentary. I’m already spoiled by the convenience and mobility of my photographic camera that I didn’t consider a lot of using Video Camera/tripod/Wireless Mic.

I’ve made many mistakes through all this way that made me frustrated a lot of times. But we’re in school where we’re allowed to make mistakes. Now I know that how much should I prepare before every interview, how to be bold enough to be close to the subject even though they look scary(bees),how to deal with the emotional Final Cut( I hate Apple), and to drag all the files from my SD card when I upload the footages to my computer.

One thing I’m glad about my project is that I made some really good shot in terms of photographic style. I wish I could grab my camera each time I was filming bees, but the video camera and tripod have driven me nuts so there was no way I could take the camera out. I did asked for help several times but it turned out that everyone was busy or they couldn’t make it. It’s ok. I told myself that I could do it since a lot of people doing their project alone too.

It’s a simple documentary piece as the name it is. But it’s my very first time making documentary too. I wish I could have more weeks to do it, or say, I should’ve started to do it weeks ago. But I’ve learned a lot by all the mistakes and experiences. And I made it.