A documentary on Bald Eagle Campground.

I did not add any interview footage as advised, as it is impossible for me to get in touch (face-to-face) with a person of interest to this story, as I only had a week, and was unable to make the long trip to central Pennsylvania. Before commencing with this project, I received permission to interview family members over the phone, and did not realize I was expected to record a phone conversation to use as audio for this project, since I would not want to use the recording of a phone or skype conversation because I do not believe the audio quality would be consistent with the rest of the piece. As both family members I interviewed helped build the campground themselves and could talk for literally days on end about the topic of Bald Eagle Campground, I thought it prudent to glean through and use the facts I thought most important to the story.

However, I did change the manuscript slightly, as I realized I had left out talking about fishing in depth, a main activity at Bald Eagle, and the driving force behind having so many water or stream shots. I also added more pictures of the forest and surrounding area. I only had a very limited time to shoot at the Campground and I probably would have tried to plan more shoot time if I was to continue adding to this video.

For this project, I wanted to focus on the talents of a good friend, Doug. He is a great musician and all-around fun guy, and he always has something interesting to say. I wanted to hear more about what he thinks about music, and about his internship in the music industry. It was a great interview, and Doug had a lot of insightful things to say. In retrospect, I should have included more footage of Doug to give the viewer a face to connect to the name and the talent. Also, it was tricky putting together shots in a way that would not affect the fluidity of Doug’s piano playing. As a classically-trained pianist myself, it was great to hear Doug play because he is great at improvisation, something I was interested in as a pianist, but never quite mastered. Also, I would have liked to include a wider variety of Doug’s talents, but unfortunately we had no access to a harmonica, Doug’s favorite musical instrument of choice. In all, filming Doug was a lot of fun and I learned a lot about video-editing in the process.

I had a lot of fun interviewing Jheanelle and I wanted to reflect her bubbly, outgoing personality in her interview and the pictures representing her. As a good friend of mine, it was fairly easy to ask questions without making interviewer or interviewee feel uncomfortable. If I was to continue working on this project I would like to get a wider variety of pictures. It would have been interesting to talk to Jheanelle about her growing up in Jamaica, but I wanted to keep the interview simple in the interest of brevity and lack of resources (ability to take shots of a foreign country). In all, it was a fun project and a good introduction to the video-making process.