"Always Ready, Ever Vigilant"

With project four came new experiences and new opportunities. The assignment was to team up and shoot a documentary. When we first got started we threw around a few different ideas. Finally, we settled on doing a piece about Sean's brother, Derek, who is a firefighter for the Plainfield Fire Department. We had at one point toyed with the idea of actually doing a documentary about making a documentary based on this topic, however we did not figure out a good way to make that particular idea work, so we went with this one.

Once the idea was cast, the next step was figuring out what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go with it. With that, came filming. We were lucky enough to be invited out to Derek's station and be able to tail him through a normal day at work. We got a lot of great footage and were able to take part in some pretty cool parts of a firefighter's life. This in itself was a cool learning experience for me. I really enjoyed the opportunity to be able to shoot this documentary and learn along the way. We had a relatively easy shoot, aside from the fact that for whatever reason the cameras we had did not charge well and we were working with extremely low battery by the end of the day, trying to keep them on charge as much as possible.

After capturing the footage, the fun began. As always, getting the footage is the relatively easy part, figuring out what to use what not use and how to use it brought new challenges. We came up with a basic outline of how we wanted the documentary to go and we ran with it. After getting it laid out we did a rough cut to see how our time was looking. We were a bit long and realized to fully present this piece to the best of our abilities, we were going to need more time. We spent most of Tuesday night editing and working on everything that went into the project. However, even with that, we had a lot left to do; which of course called for another late night. Wednesday night and well into Thursday morning we were slaving away trying to complete our project and get it working properly. We finally got it about all the way done, minus the burn onto disc which we are currently doing as I type.

This project, all in all, was a great experience. I really feel as though we got some great footage and came out with a great piece of work. Creating a documentary is a sort of new thing to me, so getting the opportunity to work on one, even as a project, was pretty cool and exciting. We logged some long hours, some hard work, and some fun times to get this project as presentable as we could, so hopefully it pleases.