Megan Webster's blog

On May 28th, after a nine months of bake sales and workshops, classes on listening and classes on ethics, laughing together and fighting in the hallways, interviewing, taking notes, editing, meeting fascinating people, watching documentaries, cutting up little pieces of paper, talking on the phone, writing letters and speeches and essays and press releases, sending millions of emails, and a thousand other things more important and more banal, the Humanities Collective felt everything come together.

We’re starting to feel the pressure of production week as the date of our screening gets closer. All of the invitations have been sent out, we’re editing the documentary and putting it all together, and we’ve started to plan the evening of the screening. The past few weeks have been really exciting, as we’re starting to feel things really come together.

We have just returned from a two week holocaust learning experience, “The March of the Living,” in which we travelled with approximately 250 other Jews our age through many places of historical significance. We spent a week in Poland visiting concentration camps, liquidated Jewish ghettos, mass graves, cemeteries and other holocaust memorials. Following this highly emotional week, we traveled to Israel where we witnessed the continued existence and rise of a Jewish people from the ashes of the crematoriums scattered across Europe.

Since the storyboard is done (wooo!), the production team have been putting an enormous amount of work into cutting out the parts of the interview for the documentary. So far, Mr. Vong's interview has been cut down to 13 minutes. This means that it is possible that our film will be longer than 39 minutes if all of our interviewee’s quotations are as long as Mr. Vong's. In my opinion, this would be a perfect length, not too long but also not too short, just enough to transmit the message to our audience.

This week has been a tremendously productive one. The videos of the Mr. Pong and Dr. Chalk interviews were downloaded by the majority of the class by the end of the weekend. On Tuesday we came together and made the decision to use all three interviews together. This required cutting our previously condensed Mr. Smey interview and finding ways to insert Mr. Pong and Dr. Chalk efficiently. This required looking at the notes from Mr. Pong’s interview and Dr. Chalk’s transcript. When this was completed, we started to create our storyboard.

This school week was only three days long, but so much is happening! On Saturday and Sunday, not one but TWO interviews were conducted and filmed! In addition, we were able to return to Mr. Smey’s house to take photos and film to use as b-roll. We are working obtaining pictures of Cambodia from various websites in hopes to be able to put visuals on Mr. Smey’s interview.

This week was one of both encouragement and frustration. On one hand, we are steaming ahead with getting what we want from Mr. Sney’s interview and constructing a storyboard. Last week the storyboard crew got the quotes they needed to make up Mr. Sney’s life story focusing on the theme of survival and Alec edited the audio over the weekend. Now we have the 15 minutes we need, which we listened to on Monday. After listening, we had a class-wide discussion on what needs to be taken out or if there are any gaps we need to fill in.

Last week we condensed our audio clips until there were only poignant quotes left. The storyboard is now adding context to it, there might be narrating involved. After the storyboard director condensed the interview and sent the crew the information, three of our team members began writing a letter in hopes of Ms. Webster being awarded by an association of oral history. This would promote Ms. Webster as a teacher who uses oral history inside the classroom. We discussed the educational values that oral history can bring to adolescents and how it should be established inside school curriculums.

I am proud to announce that our first interview has finally, finally, FINALLY, after countless obstacles and unexpected delays, made its way out of the hands of our storyboard and into the hands of our production crew, who by the end of week will have turned our storyboard into a sound file. We are currently trying to get in contact with the director of the Cambodian Documentation Center to get some B-roll for our movie, and our interviewers will be returning to Mr.

This week in the Humanities Society we took a major step towards the creation of a product. So far, we’ve been scrounging for equipment, looking for contacts and organizing meetings. We’ve finally started turning it into art. The storyboarding crew has been working hard to extract the most important segments of the interview and to organize them in such a way that will best flow with the theme of our documentary: survival.