Documentary Reflection

The topic that my documentary explored was the closed lunch policy at Blair, and how the recent modification of the policy has impacted students. Something that we learned in our research and interviews is that Ms. Johnson actually has no say in the lunch policy; it was agreed by the school board when Blair was built that it would never have open lunch. So my position on the topic is that we can’t change to an open lunch. However, if this restriction was not in place, I would say the best solution would be to open lunch and put more safety measures in place so that the students, who are already going to Woodmoor during lunch in large numbers, are less likely to be hurt. This was a good topic to focus on since it’s local and affects everyone at Blair, so it was easy to research and relate to. I think that the freedom in choosing the topics was one of the most important aspects of the project, as it allowed us to focus on the things we are interested in exploring on our own.

            While making the documentary, we did a lot of interviews with students. We found out that there are some students who don’t want an open lunch at Blair. Also, when looking back on the interviews with Ms. Johnson and Ms. Greene, it was obvious that they didn’t realize the true attitudes of the students. Most students admitted to going out for lunch at one point or another. The majority said something to the effect of “everyone does it”. However, both the principal and security guard told us that few students leave campus since the policy was enacted. They also believe that the stores are holding up to their end of the deal, while students testify that all the stores continue to serve them.

            The biggest challenge my group faced was the fact that out project got lost half way through its creation, replaced with a file that was outdated. No one could find it for a day, even with Mr. Mayo’s help. However, eventually Maddie managed to retrieve it, and we got our work back. Another challenge was the fact that a large part of our documentary was going to be based on our own experiences of going to Woodmoor during lunch, but one of the assistant principals prevented us from leaving. We worked around this, using more student interviews.

            If we could redo the documentary, we might have written the voiceover earlier and given it a more prominent place in the project, because most of it is just switching between interviews.  I think that if we had to turn in a script early on, the project would have been more manageable, and it would have been easier to piece together everything to create the final product. I think that the project was interesting and it challenged us.