New Release

Sewickley, PA

  Geoff Klein, a senior broadcast communications major, is the son of Gene and Pam Klein and a graduate of Quaker Valley High School. His documentary, The Magic of Literacy, is about the First Book Westminster program and raising the importance of a child having literature at a young age. It hopes to encourage the audience to donate their time and/or money toward the First Book organization. Professionals discuss their opinion of First Book and its mission to provide poor families with books. Geoff has always loved doing community service and was very excited about helping the organization. “I love what the organization does for families and I hope this documentary inspires people to help out,” Geoff said. “I think my favorite part of this whole experience was making the music; being a musician myself and working with the other great artists really made it fun for me.” 

Invitation

You are cordially invited to the viewing of “The Magic of Literacy”, a documentary about The First Book Westminster Program. This documentary hopes to encourage the viewer to donate their time and/or money toward the organization. It also aspires to raise the awareness of the importance of a child having literature at a young age. Professionals discuss their opinion of First Book and its mission to provide poor families with literature. We hope to see you December 3^rd around 2pm in Mueller Theater. 

Evaluating the Final Product

Today I am asked to talk about three skills or abilities that I deem detrimental to my documentary. These skills will then be used to grade and assess my production. So what do I think is most important? The most important is good video, because with out good pictures you can't tell a great story. While producing this documentary I was often very worried about some shots, but loved others. Sometimes I caught moments I didn't even expect and they enhanced my story that much more. Sometimes its about patience keeping a shot an extra couple minutes to capture the moment. Though I believe it will help and hurt my assessment at the same time, I believe that you have to have good video. Second is how you put it together so the editing of it should be second most important. If you don't follow some type of chronological or storytelling path then your story looks randomly put together. Making sure every interview makes sense and works with what you show is extremely important. It was a lot harder for me to make a story out of mine with out a narrator, but I believe when I'm done it'll make sense that I didn't have one. It might come to no surprise then that the last skill is audio. This where I've got the cat in the bag, but first I'll explain its importance. So you have interviews, music, and audio from your b-roll which we like to call nat-sound. I imagine telling a story to a little kid when I think of using nat-sound. I know that it helps them with their imagination to hear the sound as its being read from the book. I take this and I use the same style for adults and thats how movies help books tell their story. I love the fact that I have suiting music for my documentary that flows with the style I present it and nat-sound of children reading and learning. All of this will help towards telling my story which comes to another trait that I think everything goes into which is storytelling. Okay at the beginning I told you I had to pick three so I did and to me those are all important because they tell a great story and story telling is the name of the game in a documentary. Therefore it would be unfair of me to at least recognition the importance of storytelling. How do you determine whether or not you like a book, a novel, a movie, ect? That's right storytelling is how and these three traits used correctly enhance the story that much more. So when my professor, the audience, and whom ever else watches this later on decides if they like it or not. I hope that they hold me to these three things, because I'll be focused on keeping them in check.

Presentation Style and Structure

Today I am talking about how my documentary will be voiced. My documentary will not have a narrator, instead the interviews will speak for themselves. I will use words during my b-roll to structure the documentary so that it present facts with audio from interviews. I decided to take this approach because I think with my documentary it better to hear the professionals voice their own opinion and talk about themselves rather than have someone introduce them and sum up what they have to say. I think that most of the time when I interview someone I like hearing them say what they have to say better than when I say it for them. I break it up with having the professionals talk about one specific opinion they have relevant to what the facts have said and what the other professionals had to say. Arguably I think the documentary has a beginning we see the secretary for first book with videos of bookshelves and you hear about this organization, followed by a middle information about first book along with professional opinions on the organization, and end why is it so important that people help out this organization.