Create a 3-5 Minute Video on a Topic of Interest or Fascinating Story

I’ll be using this short doc I directed on the NY Times site as an example for a lot of the techniques covered in the course. Watch Strike: The Greatest Bowling Story Ever Told on YouTube to follow along. It's about 12 minutes long.

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ASSIGNMENT

Research, shoot, edit, and post a 3-5 minute interview with a subject of your choice about a personal story of theirs. This can be an expert in your line of work or field of interest, a customer for a case study, or as simple and interesting as a family member’s history. Your project can include as many interview subjects as you want, but obviously must have at least one person. Incorporate b-roll and archival material to create a polished film with no noticeable edits.

DELIVERABLES

To produce your video interview, you will need to:

Start off your project by sharing a summary of what your film will be about, who you would like to interview, and what b-roll you plan to incorporate.
Share a radio edit / rough cut of your video. Keep it under 10 minutes. If you have questions about how to edit your video, leave them here and I'll be happy to give you some feedback!
Upload your final, polished video

RESOURCES

If you'd like to read more about documentaries, filmmaking, and editing, here's some books I've found to be really useful.

Directing the Documentary by Michael Rabinger. If there was a bible for documentary filmmaking this would be it. It's been around for years, currently on its sixth edition, so it refers to a more traditional style of documentary filmmaking. But it's still packed with lots of useful info.
Cinematography by Kris Malkiewicz and M. David Mullen, ASC. While this book is centered around shooting with actual film there's still tons to learn about lighting in general. It's explanations of color temperature are what really made the concept click for me. Film or digital, most concepts in this book will always be relevant.
Conquering the metadata foundations of Final Cut Pro X by Philip Hodgetts. This book sold me on using FCPX as my editing software. It shows all the many ways you can use FCPX's metadata capabilities to better organize your footage and media. Though FCPX has gone through a few updates since this book was written, most of the tips on metadata remain the same.

Pete Anderson

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