Jennifer Smee is a junior cultural anthropology major at UCSC. Her academic interests include documentary filmmaking, visual anthropology and cultural anthropological theory.

 

Reflections: The focus of the project shifted a few times and so that made it hard in the editing room as not all interviewees had been asked the same questions. In editing our film we arranged and rearranged our interview clips many times and this was very time consuming. We also ended up having to cut a lot of clips that we originally wanted to be in the film because they ended up not being totally relevant and/or we didn’t have the space to fit them in. The “undo” key became a savior, one we used frequently! I think the biggest frustration was finding the flow of the film, after that, filling in the gaps was easy.
I learned a lot about interviewing people this quarter. We started interviewing using only the questions we had prepared and I realized this made for an extremely dry interview. What worked best was having a conversation where the focus is the other person. This takes a lot of listening on my part and also an ability to ad-lib when I needed to. I had to let go of preconceived ideas of what the content of the interview should be and let the conversation take a different direction if it needed to. A less structured approach works much better.
Sarah and I laughed a lot making this film. Having a partner means compromising and blending ideas and though this can be really frustrating at times, it’s a huge learning experience in the end. The most important thing is to be able to have fun in making the film and to stay positive through the anxiety.