Final Reflection

Today, Sunday April 26th, we are sitting at Lovett exporting the final version of our assembly presentation. It is an incredible feeling. For the past month (two months really) Ben and I have worked tirelessly on our project. In the beginning, we had to convince both the Senior Project Committee and our parents that kayaking 180+ miles alone with little experience was a good idea. Not surprisingly, our parents proved the hardest to persuade. My mom was terrified from start to finish- I’m still not exactly sure how she let me go. Anyway, Ben and I worked about 2 to 3 hours every single day after school in the month leading up to the trip. We had to gather all of our camping supplies, food, dry bags, camera gear, and portable charging devices. Once we had all of our gear together, we had to decide how we wanted to transport it on our kayaks. We spent a couple of days figuring out the best and most efficient way to do so. Lastly, we took the kayaks to a nearby lake to make sure that they floated with all of the gear on them-thankfully they did! On the morning of March 30th we hopped in the car during a pouring rainstorm. It rained the entire way to Fort Gaines and stopped right when we got out of the car. That was the last time it rained for 7 days- we were so lucky! I am confident that those 10 days were the driest it has ever been in that area during the month of April. Aside from the perfect weather, the trip went exactly as planned with almost no hiccups. Nearly every person we met was very nice and offered to help us in some way. Most often they would offer us food and we would gladly accept. We even had a couple people offer to give us a room in their camper for us to sleep in! However, although we met lots of people, we dropped the ball. We said in our proposal that we would be interviewing the locals as we went along the river. We genuinely thought that this would be feasible until we actually started talking to people. Image this: We would be having a nice conversation with someone along the river. They would tell us stories-all very interesting but sometimes slightly illegal- and we would listen very intently. We quickly realized that saying “hey, can we film this conversation? Just try and act normal again” would kill the mood. From that point on we decided to take more footage of ourselves so we could make the documentary about our experience. I’m glad we went in this direction. When we got back, we went to Mr. Silverman to ask him about the documentary. At first, we were trying to salvage our previous idea of making the film about people we met. He told us that people will be much more interested in our own perspective of the trip. The first week back we worked on our script. We used a program called Celtx which allowed us to write the script in the “official” script writing format. It allowed us to both write the voiceover and put notes to the side about what videos we wanted to show while we talked. We decided to interview ourselves on camera instead of just recording into a mic. This gave us some filler footage for places where we weren’t sure what we would show. On Sunday, April 18 Ben and I went to Lovett to record our script. Mr. Silverman nicely helped us get the camera and lighting set up. It was very helpful to have the script out of the way. For the final week, all we had to do was edit the video. This process was INCREDIBLY tedious. Neither Ben nor I had used the editing software (Adobe Premiere) before so it took us a while to become proficient. We got to Lovett last Saturday at 12 o’clock, thinking that all we needed to do was put the final touches on the video. Those “final touches” turned into 8 hours of tiny edits to make the movie flow. We had to pick out music that we liked and sync it up with the video and fix other audio problems with Premiere. Overall, I can say with confidence that Ben and I grew because of all aspects of the project. We had to plan the trip almost completely on our own with little help from our parents. We had to problem solve and persevere during some very long and very tiring days on the river. We learned to work as a team towards a common goal with almost no hiccups- we surprisingly didn’t have any major arguments throughout the whole process. We learned how to write a script for a short film. We learned how to use editing software and make a solid film. We somehow barely procrastinated at all and never lost interest during the any part of the project. Honestly, exporting the video on Saturday night was one of the proudest moments I have had a Lovett. I cannot express how glad I am that I was able to do both the trip and create the documentary. Both are experiences that I will never forget!