Video Ideas.

Hey Nicole!
All fantastic ideas! At the moment the idea that I am particularly drawn to is the first idea for a documentary on insomnia. Because you also experience this along with people that you know I think that you would be able to really dive into different things that people do to try to cure their insomnia, or kill time until they sleep, and how it effects their waking hours. In fact I think you might be able to incorporate parts of all your other ideas into this one! You would be able to follow different people (shown through split screen if you choose) on their different nighttime activities and even make it kind of funny like in your parody idea! There is a lot of potential here! I am going to show some different documentary examples in class today that I think you might find helpful. There is this genre of documentary that I particularly love which is a very observational method. It means that there is no added stuff from outside of the scene. That means no interviews, no voice overs, no extra music (sometimes this is good thought) so that there is almost no presence of a filmmaker which allows the audience to directly connect to the subject of the documentary. I think insomnia is a really really interesting topic to focus on also because I feel like there are a lot of people your age that have a lot of pressure on them to be doing a lot. There is everything that you are doing in high school plus working a job and trying to get into college! When is there time to sleep!??! This is a topic I think a lot of people could relate to and one you could put a lot of personal touches in which would make it all the more easier to connect with your audience. It would also give you a lot of room to be inventive with how you show the different examples especially in the editing. It's always tricky but interesting showing numerous stories at once and how you will weave them together to be a colorful blanket!
The only issues I see with the other ones (which you might have solutions for...) are 2. shoplifting: really interesting but maybe difficult to find a setting that would let you shoot there 3. not as intriguing as the insomnia documentary 4. a major undertaking. I think this sounds like a beautiful and touching idea but unfortunately we have pretty tight time restrictions which might not allow you to do all that you want to with this project. Definitely keep this one stored away for when you make your big hollywood debut though! This is an idea that could be worked on and fleshed out in a major way and be a great project for maybe next year if you start planning it now or for a personal project! Joe and I of course are always psyched to help with those too!
Looking forward to talking more soon!
Lenora