I forgot how to do an update

#tbh it's been a hot minute since I've done a production update on here and I don't remember what I'm supposed to say so I guess I'll just summarize. 

Picture this. It's 6:10 am on a Friday. Not just any Friday. But the first day of spring break. And your alarm goes off. Just a grating, ugly sound going off right next to your ear. So you drag yourself out of bed to get ready for a full day of filming. Now, for what it's worth, I usually really enjoy filming. It's so fun most of the time. But once it's gone over 7 hours, then it kinda starts to suck. But anyway back to the story. Megan picks me up at 6:45ish, I had already dropped off the equipment the day before so I was only bringing my mirror for one of the shots and some books (again for a shot). We pick up Mariano and then go to Publix to buy a plant and some breakfast (we just ended up buying a box of croissants). We get to Megan's house at 7 and immediately start working. Megan works on getting the neck contraption on Mariano while I set up the lighting and camera. Apparently the molding makeup thing is not strong enough to put a part of a Playstation on someone's neck, so we had to try other not very pretty methods but eventually we were able to figure it out. 

We shot for a couple hours, I filmed everything, Megan was boom operator. Megan's friend who played the engineer got there at like 10. We had a short lunch break. The room that we were filming in was soooo hot cause there was 3 lights, 4 people, and we had to close all the doors oh my god it was horrible.

 

We were done filming at around 6:30ish I think, full 12 hours. We shot a good 80% of what we need, we're just missing likr two scenes which we're planning to film on Monday since Megan is in Vegas right now. But yeah I think it went really well! I'm usually really scared when I have to shoot stuff cause cameras scare and confuse me, but I got the hang of this one pretty quick. There were a couple problems that happened during production but to be honest it went as smooth as production can go so that's great. 

Photo Dump

Feet Production 2

Kanno

So, the Tuesday after we filmed a big chunk of our interviews, we interviewed Mr. Kanno who is my sociology teacher. Luckily, he agreed to do this interview, even though he seemed a little confused when I told him what the topic was. Having had Mr. Kanno as my teacher for two years already, I knew he was gonna talk about social media, which was great because we definitely wanted to explore how much on impact body standards from social media may have on our perception of feet (can't believe I just wrote that sentence). 

While he was not aware of the shifting perceptions of feet, he brought up some other very interesting points on body image and body standards. For example, he has recently noticed his students using pimple patches to hide their acne, to which he said, "Now, you know, they've taken something that was like, you know, a source of shame. And they've now made it a piece of fashion." Overall this interview went really great, it was like over an hour and a half long and had so many interesting opinions. My favorite insight that Mr. Kanno gave was, "you got to you got a generation of kids, Gen Z, and probably even younger, who grew up. That's been amplified. And, and, and, you know, just like on steroids, you know, like, you have to look this way. You have to look this way. You know, some people really take that literally, you know, and so you see body transformations, things that they just try to scare. And so I think that that's probably why there might be a correlation. I don't think it's a causation, but there might be a correlation. Why Gen Z has a higher problem with seeing images like that, or they're disgusted by things like that." (This is from a generated transcript but basically he went really into how growing up seeing only perfection definitely would have an impact on self-perception.

B-Roll

The Wednesday later, me and Zach spent the entirety of our lunch filming b-roll. And you might be asking how we could've possibly gotten any b-roll for this. And the answer is exactly what you would imagine. We went around the school filming shoes. Unfortunately, as much as we hoped we could get footage of actual feet, the county dress codes restrict the exposure of feet (that's why there's so many socks and sandals around), so we had to adapt and only film shoes. I'll admit, while most of our footage was consensual, this was probably my top 10 most uncomfortable experiences of my life because honestly how do you ask someone if they would be okay with you filming their feet? I can laugh about it now, but Wednesday 12:30 PM I was not having a fun time. I don't have any of the b-roll saved on my laptop, but most of it was just shots of people walking or of their shoes. 

Vic's B-roll shot

Vic also filmed her own b-roll which was definitely more stylistic and it ended up looking really cool. Unfortunately, mostly due to time constraints during editing, we did not get to include any of the b-roll. 

Luke

The last interview we filmed was Luke's. This interview was a little last minute when we realized we should probably get a guy Gen Z interviewee. Honestly, I wish we would have gotten more of a variety of Gen Z ages, especially since we only got senior interviewees (17-18), while I don't think the answers would've changed too much, I do think it would added more validity to our documentary. Yk since Gen z is between 1997 to 2012, not 2006 to 2007. I was not present for Luke's interview, Zach was the only one who could that day, but I do like how it came out. Especially how him wearing socks with sandals contrast so much with Mr. Berna's statement about socks. 

And those were all the interviews we were able to get. Altogether, the interview transcripts added up to 25 pages on Google Doc (with a font of 9). Editing was mostly Zach and Vic, I helped with the MOTS and was available to help with anything else that they needed, but to be honest, I am so glad that they took care of the editing, because combing through all of that footage looked like a pain. 

Feet Production 1

Production stage yippee!!! 

Mr. Berna - 11/07

Sorry, this was the best screenshot I could get

The first interview we conducted was with Mr. Berna. He's Zach's English teacher and has a minor in psychology. This interview went so much better than I could've possibly imagined. He gave us so much interesting insight, from theories of why Gen z has this relationship with such a crucial part of their body to his own experience as a teacher with his students. He was really passionate about the topic which was soooo great for us. His interview ended up being about 20 minutes long (pain to edit). We filmed the interview during our lunch period (luckily my teacher gave me double lunch and I was able to be there), so he had to eat his ramen for the interview which was kinda funny. Overall, this interview went great and we got so much good footage.

MOTS @ Town Center - 11/11

When we first started planning out this doc, we knew we wanted to include a man on the streets segment. For two main reasons, the first one being that it was a pretty simple way to gauge general public opinion of all ages, and the second one being that it would make a great intro to hook audiences in. This was pretty daunting at first because, as you can imagine, going up to random strangers and asking their opinion on feet isn't what my ideal Saturday would look like. Zach filmed, Vic interviewed, and I got extra footage with my camcorder. I think after the first couple interviews, we started feel a little more comfortable, and we ended up getting some GREAT footage. Surprisingly (but not at all), most of the responses were the same. The older generations had no problem with feet, in fact, when we showed them the picture of the foot, many people commented on how well-kept they were, and even some on how beautiful they looked. The younger generations however seemed so much more uncomfortable looking at the pictures. Surprise, surprise!

Our man on the streets went pretty well, other than the sun setting pretty early on, the interviews were so perfect for our topic. And then Zach goes to check the audio. Completely unusable. Genuinely so crushing when he told us. We think it was a problem with the mic because it sounded fine in the camera. We were already trying to schedule a day to reshoot when I remembered that I filmed practically everything on my camcorder. I was pretty reluctant that any of the audio would be good since it's really old and I was standing pretty far away but, by some miracle, the audio wasn't horrible. I was literally jumping for joy in my room. That was so stressful.

Cecilia - 11/11

After doing our man on the streets, we interviewed Vic's friend, Cecilia. While I do think we got some pretty great responses with this interview (especially surrounding hygiene), the biggest problem was that it was pretty late at night, so the lighting was pretty bad. I also talked to Cecilia in class later that week and I feel like she had so much to say. I would love to redo this interview again because I feel like it could be so much better.