The name of my documentary is The Stressful Application. It surrounds two high school seniors and their rigorous journey of applying to colleges.
To begin researching the world of documentaries, we watched a few documentaries as a class, as I discussed in this previous blog post: https://brillianticonicqueenblog.blogspot.com/2024/12/documentary-viewingresearch.html . The documentaries Exit Through The Gift Shop and American Promise were the two documentaries that inspired me and my partners project the most. They both mostly used personal storytelling, which made them feel more raw and real which is exactly the approach we wanted for our project. It felt like the best way to connect with our target audience and tell our stories honestly.
When it came time to choose a genre for our documentary, my partner and I decided to take an informational approach. As current seniors in the middle of applying to college, we felt that this topic was something we knew the most about, so we could speak about with firsthand experience. It made sense to make our documentary. Our goal was not only to share our own journeys but also to make it useful for future seniors. We wanted to break down parts of the process and share what to expect so that upcoming seniors could feel a little more informed when their time comes to apply. It felt like the most reasonable approach to choosing a genre.
Research for this project was fairly easy due to the fact that we chose such a familiar topic to create our informational documentary on. We researched some articles to add in different stories, opinions and experiences about the college application process. These two articles were the main ones we used to research the topic. The articles we read talked about how even small details can impact your chances of getting into college, the mental toll it takes, and the huge pressure students feel, especially in their junior and senior years of high school. These articles show that students are not alone in this process and that these feelings they feel during it are super common. Choosing this topic made me feel even more confident in our documentary because it’s so relatable not just for others, but for us too.
Our target audience is teenagers aged 15 to 18, regardless of gender expression. We wanted to create something that would resonate with high school students who are either starting to think about college or are already in the process of applying to college. After finishing our documentary, It was showed to our class, which gave us the chance to get honest feedback from people close to our target audience. Getting their critiques and thoughts was super helpful because it gave us a better idea of we could improve. For example, one of the critiques that stood out to me was that our interviews should've been filmed in a different place so it could come off as more visually interesting and engaging. But when me and my partner filmed it we thought it made it look more simple and helped the audience focus on the topic not the background. Now that many people mentioned that, i would've used two different interviews for me and my partners interviews and i would've used a blur background effect so it can focus on us being interviewed.
Reading and hearing other people's constructive criticism and thoughts on my project really opened my eyes to many aspects of the documentary. One of the more popular feedback was how to make our documentary more interesting. People mentioned that we should've used different backgrounds, more b-roll and background music. I feel like now i realized that the different backgrounds are indeed more visually interesting and i do think we should've used and filmed more b-roll because would've helped keep the audience from getting bored of just seeing us being interviewed and some background music could've made point of view and tone clearer. Through other critiques I noticed that our structure was a little bit messy, it seemed to be very summarized, and I feel like we could've gone in more depth in our interviews pertaining to the questions and the answers and more in depth in the voice overs explaining background information.
Our research really shaped the way we made our documentary, like how we got inspired by different documentary styles. Watching documentaries like Exit Through the Gift Shop and American Promise taught us how personal and real stories can make a documentary feel relatable. We loved how those films drew you in by focusing on real people and their experiences, so we took that similar approach. By sharing our own journey through the college application process, we made the documentary feel personal and informational to our target audience. A way we challenged conventions was by directly targeting specifically teenagers in high school, a group that often gets overlooked in serious documentaries. Most documentaries we researched were educational and they all had the same fast pacing, short, distracting interviews, and a hyper tone. To make ours more educational for teens, we used simple, visually appealing edits, a casual tone, and relatable scenarios from our own lives. We didn’t shy away from showing our own struggles with stress and pressure, which helped us connect with our audience in a way that feels honest and approachable. we challenged the idea that documentaries have to fit into one box. We wanted ours to feel both useful and personal instead of theatrical.
