Post #4- Documentary Inspiration

My inspiration for this documentary comes straight from the heart. Cheerleading has always been my escape from all negative things. I've been through several teams and although I've made great friends and made many memories, none of those teams have felt like home. However, that has changed recently. I became a part of the Hudson High School cheer team and instantly felt a sense of peace.

Once I joined this team, I instantly knew that my documentary would be based on cheerleading. To be more specific, this blog and future blogs will be based on the creation of an excerpt of the first episode of my entire documentary. I want to focus on what cheerleading does for an athlete and dive deeper into the meaning behind the sport. I will do this by showcasing practices where athletes demonstrate pure determination, showing cheer competitions where participants express pure emotion and passion, and by interviewing members of the team as well as coaches.

By interviewing athletes, I will be able to collect opinions and ideas that express how much cheer means to these triple crown champion athletes. They will be asked questions such as, "what has this team done for you mentally?" in which they will be encouraged to respond with pure honesty and intention. This will allow me to achieve my main purpose of informing audiences of the significant impact cheer has on Hudson High School athletes.

By interviewing coaches, I will be able to capture a higher authority's viewpoint on cheerleading. These coaches work extremely hard to ensure the best experience for their athletes and by capturing their opinions, my audience will be enabled to be preferred readers and decode the message as intended. This relates to Stuart Halls reception theory which states that producers will encode specific meaning into productions in which viewers can decode in a variety of ways which are negotiated reading, preferred reading, and oppositional reading. Preferred reading means that audiences fully understand and accept the intended or encoded meaning.

With that being said, by interviewing athletes and coaches, my primary purpose will be achieved which will allow me to communicate the deeper meaning cheer has which is something very near and dear to my heart.

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Post #64 -Critical Reflection

The process of constructing this documentary required extensive research, planning, editing, marketing, and further refinement. When researching other products labeled as sports documentaries, I was able to identify what conventions would and would not be included in my products which in return link s to audience engagement. Conventions are elements that are commonly used within a specific genre, and audience engagement refers to the interest, involvement, and emotional connection someone has to a piece of media. I also identified what social groups and issues I would be targeting. During the research phase I studied the documentary " Starting 5". When studying the micro elements within the film, I recognized that the documentary failed to address the emotional aspect of basketball. Instead, the practices and principles of the sport were explored. This ...

Post #25- Gantt Chart For Documentary Excerpt

A Gantt chart is utilized to allow producers and their crews to visualize their schedule and the time in which each phase is taking place. These charts may represent past phases, present, and future. For reference, the Gantt chart attached above is a chart that I have constructed, and it depicts the timeline of my production process. This shows the dates in which I started researching, ended researching, the dates in which I started planning, the date I plan to end planning, the scheduled date to start filming, end filming, and enter post production which leads me to the final upload of my documentary excerpt. By creating this chart, I am able to keep myself on task and follow this timeline so that my audiences build trust in Pridgen Productions, encouraging them to spread positive press and maybe even create fandoms. This can be connected to Henry Jenkins' theory because he believes that audiences are active media consumers who share, interpret, and apply content within fi...

Post #32- Interview Questions

I have reached the stage of my production process where I have begun to consider what questions my interviewees will be asked in order to inspire their responses in which will develop the meaning I have encoded. To ensure I evoke immense emotion from my interviewees, I have constructed meaningful questions that will develop the deep narrative rather than surface level content. Since I have encoded a deep narrative, I have decided to use this as my unique selling point. This is considered a unique selling point because a common mistake many producers make is not including a deep narrative to their film and instead focusing on the principles of the sport. Therefore, including this detail makes my product appealing to a significant amount of people and creates emotional connections between the audience and documentary. After taking these factors into consideration, the following questions are being considered to include in my final product. - What is cheerleading and what...

Olivia Pridgen AL media studies project

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