Senior Film logline

Two Conservative American parents try to raise their daughter in their footsteps, but when she is a teenager, she reveals that she is a liberal Democrat. They try to pray away her political stance by taking her to church and Republican political rallies, but they come to the realization that they can't change their daughter.

Transcending

My documentary is a look into the trans and non binary students of Booker T. I will be interviewing students of all grades and all clusters about how they are treated by friends, family, peers, and teachers. I am looking to have a very relaxed feeling in the film, like the viewer is the one conversing with the student. I have written up a list of questions to ask.

1. State and spell your preferred name
2. What is the name that was assigned to you at birth?
3. Why did you choose to go by a different name?
4. What gender do you identify as?
5. How does this differ from the gender you were assigned at birth?
6. How did you tell your parents that you were trans/non binary?
7. At what age did you realize your gender was different from the one you were assigned at birth?
8. What pronouns do you prefer people use when referring to you?
9. What difficulties do you you find people have when talking to/about you?
10. How do you feel trans/non binary people are represented in mainstream media?

I want to do most of the interviews at school because the subject is students from Booker T who are trans/non binary. I already have a few students lined up to be interviewed.

I want to take definitions of trans/non binary etc... and super impose them onto some shots of students and certain places in Booker T and the Arts District.

Doc Review

Documentary Review

I watched Into the Abyss by Werner Herzog the other day. This film appealed to me because it took place so close the where I live. The filmmaker made many choices that I admire, such as conducting interviews ion many different settings with relatives of everyone involved in the crime. The film took us through the home of the crime, and clips of police video were cut in to show the differences between the house at the time of the crime and the house today. The film was interspersed with crime scene photos from everywhere the boys went.
One thing that I found very interesting was the different placement of the interviewees. Many of those who were interviewed were incarcerated at the time of filming, and it was cool to see the different ways that the interviews had to be conducted with the different barriers was very interesting.   My favorite camera technique was when interviews got more tense, the camera would cut closer to the face of the interviewees, creating a sense of interest in the minds of the viewers.  The splicing of the interviews with Burkett and his son really created a sense of the family that was never really there.
A lot of the interviews that Herzog conducts are littered with the question "describe it". I think this choice was made because Herzog wants the interviewees to really delve into what they are talking about and become emotional. He seems to ask very personal questions that could make some people uncomfortable, and more than once those who are interviewed start crying.
I don't think my documentary will be as deep or emotional as this was. I want my doc to be more upbeat and about the positives of the world. I would like to employ some of the same camera techniques, and f the doc was longer, I would like to divide it into chapters like Herzog did.