Pursuing Passion: Critical Reflection

PURSUING PASSION

Pursuing Passion is a 5 minute documentary on the teachers at Bamachol Dance Program and how they each planned on pursuing a specific career but found themselves now teaching dance. The four interviewees each studied law, dentistry, architecture, and nutrition, yet strayed from their original career paths to spread their love and desire for dance. This piece explores the idea of doing what makes you happy rather than the most logical plan, even as an adult. 

After deciding on the general topic of dance, my partner and I began to collect research. We watched various dance documentaries and saw a pattern of repetitive b-roll. It made the entire piece look boring and we lost interest quickly due to the lack of variation in the shots. We really wanted to challenge the typical “dance documentary” conventions. All of these films had the same overall theme of the struggles a dancer experiences or on the studio itself. We chose the studio based on convenience since it's the studio I go to. When trying to pick a more detailed topic, I informed my partner that all of the teachers at the studio went to college for very different careers. I then spoke to them in person and took note of each university and major, or majors, they went for. We then took this information and chose which seems the most different to dance, to be the most entertaining for the audience, and chose the four subjects to interview. 

Another way we tried to break these normal conventions was through the b-roll. As I mentioned previously, most of the shots in these dance films were long shots of the dancers from the front, had poor lighting, and had slow-motion close-ups. To stay away from this, we chose to get creative as possible. Since this was more focused on the teachers and staff, we found a way to represent what they do on a daily basis through shots that would intrigue the audience. Some examples and close-ups as they choreograph, long shots of a teacher as they stand behind the dancers dancing, and the director reprimanding the girls. 

Our goal was to create a fun, engaging documentary that also made the audience realize how important it is to not pursue something solely based on logistics and convenience. Our target audience was young adults, although the theme could also apply to older adults. The era of both high school and college is a crucial time in character development. These teens and early twenty-year-olds are put in such a difficult position since they must decide their entire life path at such a young age. Our piece is meant to show this group of individuals that nothing is completely set in stone. They can change paths if they don’t love the one they originally choose. This also applies to adults who don't currently enjoy their job or have a child who is facing similar issues. We ensured this audience though through not only our entertaining b-roll but also through our interviews. We created a list of questions geared to have our subjects show emotion and passion towards their journey as well as their current position at the studio, and for each interview, we slightly changed the questions to have the best responses. Since every journey is different, the interviews are set up this way to allow the audience to compare them and keep their attention. Something we could have done differently is in our editing. 

Our overall production was intended to represent adults who left the career they studied in college for one that fulfills them. Our b-roll and interviews show in-depth what they specifically do throughout the day and the joy they experience from working as a dance teacher. Even though we set our intention for the theme perfectly, we didn’t edit it to represent it well. The ideas we discussed got lost through the excessive use of b-roll and not enough interview segments, although we did have the content for it. I would say we were successful in explaining the macro-topic, but from a micro-perspective, failed to represent the depth of the situation properly. By piecing together the interviews in a different format, the message could have been clearer for the audience.