Luz Valdez

June 1, 2006

I. "MY SYNTHESIS PRODUCT SHOWS THAT..."

This journey has come to and end, and marks the start of another in which I hope to produce documentaries that establish good connections with the audience. I will continue to work on developing the mechanisms and strategies to bridge the gap that has traditionally existed between filmmaker and audience. My goal is to create documentaries that convey messages both cognitively and emotionally.
This research process has been incredibly invigorating and valuable to me. The knowledge and experience I have acquired in this reflective process will allow me to pay more attention to my audience and the way they process information. I believe that soon, choosing between a documentary and fiction film will no longer be a matter of genre because both of them will have the capacity to entertain and enlighten the audience.
My synthesis shows that the tools I learned in the CCT Program have helped me to set the theoretic bases to consolidate future endeavors as a documentary filmmaker. Producing documentaries that incite curiosity and generate a desire to learn is a challenge that has driven me to work on this project and develop a structure to frame my future documentaries.
During this process it has been very important for me to analyze the reality and the importance of my role as a mediating and creative agent. I consider that a filmmaker is an agent who compiles facts and creates productive abstractions to represent a wider and deeper aspect of the reality. This means that there will be more room to apply critical and creative thinking skills to produce documentaries that transfer knowledge while eliciting emotions.
In this process I have also designed a categorization of documentaries. The intention is to address the need of the audience and make it easy for them to chose the types of documentaries that could make their viewing experience more exciting. I am also conscious that my synthesis has opened many windows to approach to documentary theory, practice and there is also room for further development. I am confident that the new form my project has taken will put me closer to the role I want to play as an educator and filmmaker. I expect to continue doing research in the field of documentary film making and put in practice what I have learned through this process.
My paper shows that there were steps that needed to be followed in order to set the basis for my research. During this process, I needed to go back and forth while doing some of the exercises to find my own tools that would put me closer to my project and to the way I process my thinking. I enjoyed this process and have the need to continuously and consistently work toward my goals to improve the quality of my research and widen the scope.
In the course of this project I have had the opportunity to watch a great number of documentaries and reflect on the topics presented and the styles of presentation. I surveyed audience concerns and read theoretical materials about cognition and film theory. The materials I gathered help me to talk more assertively about what currently happens in documentary films and what resources my future documentaries would use to improve the relationship with the audience. Now I am more aware of what others filmmakers have done in the past, what the current tendencies in documentary theory and practice are and what needs to be researched in the field. At the end of this experience, I feel ready to start my creative endeavor as a documentarian.
Documentaries are getting wider acceptance by movie audiences because of their content and quality. This acceptance opens the possibility for more research and I hope that my synthesis will open new areas of research for other filmmakers in the way it did for me.
All the exercises done to determine priorities, narrow my topic and discard other possibilities were very useful. Reviewing my questions every so often kept me going in the right direction and helped me to complete a product I am proud of. While developing my ideas, I struggled a lot with the inclination I had in the past to think that people did not watch documentaries because they were boring. After reviewing my main questions several times, I discovered that the types of documentaries that are boring for me, are not boring for others; which means that every type of documentary has its audience. Therefore my goal would be to identify other types of documentaries and the audiences that were not reached by the traditional documentaries.
Identifying the main premises and propositions of my topic of research and stating the counter-prepositions to find the weakness and contradictions of my main arguments has been a very good exercise that help me to narrow my topic and clarify the areas of research. I find this tool applicable for documentary projects because it helps to sustain their conceptual consistency through the selection and organization of materials and it also helps to avoid distractions that could divert from the main topic.
The personal planning techniques I have learned have helped me to find my own tools to orient myself in my journey in order to find the resources to write my synthesis about my future endeavors in documentary film. I am very pleased with my final product and how it is presented. With respect to my deadlines I am thankful I could comply with them. I was afraid I would fail because English is not my first language and every modification I needed to do to my project required constant revision and proofreading. Due to the cooperation and support I received from my instructors, classmates and friends with my revisions, proofreading and editing I accomplished my goal of having my synthesis done by the deadline.
My direct informers were the individuals I surveyed in the Action Research course who gave me their opinion about how they experience documentaries. Another way to get direct information it was by watching documentaries and annotating how I experienced them. This was a good exercise to put me on track of the latest productions and the new styles the documentary is developing. Shifting my role between the author, opinionated voice and audience will broaden my own perspective and I feel confident I am doing justice to my subject matter, my subjects, and my audience.
The public presentation helped me to organize and summarize my ideas in a form that would attract the attention of the audience and get useful feedback from them. I believe the overall result was favorable to my project. It was a self assessment of my abilities to convey ideas using some audiovisual aids to and overcome my language barriers. I also used my presentations as a guide to design the structure of my project.
The outlines that were derived from my presentations served as guides for my writing because they could draw the most relevant aspects of my project. When I wrote the narrative outline I saw the connections between different pieces of the project to the whole main idea. It was very helpful when I started writing the paper because it gave me reasons why certain topics needed to be developed more than others.
In my special case, writing a non-fiction paper is a process that requires discipline, concentration and perseverance. It has been very hard for me to accommodate myself in this process because I tend to recycle everything and it is very difficult to screen out materials on my topic or to my position. The reading materials provided in classes like Peter Elbow’s book: Writing with Power was a great source to overcome aspects related to content and structure that I needed to address to support my paper and make it consistent. My first draft went through different processes like direct writing and quick revising which were very useful when I could not produce anything. I tried very hard to produce something that made sense but writing non-fiction is a very hard process for me because I go in circles trying to find better ways to say things. Free writing techniques help me to get out of those circles as I wrote as much as possible about my topic and this helped me to move forward.
To open avenues for my project I would like to participate in seminars and conferences about documentary film. I would like to have the chance to update my information and develop new connections in the field. I am also looking forward to teaching workshops in documentary film and introduce the concepts I have developed in my synthesis. I would like to organize documentary film screenings and invite filmmakers to give their testimonies about their experience in the field and with the audience.

II. DEVELOPING AS A REFLECTIVE PRACTITIONER, INCLUDING TAKING INITIATIVE IN AND THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS

The perspective CCT program gave me with the courses on Cognitive Psychology, Critical Thinking, the Dialogue Process, Creative Thinking, Action Research and Synthesis were very important and useful to my development as a filmmaker. They guided me in the process of finding topics that are closely related to what I would like to research and help me develop my own methods of inquiry. The tools provided during the engagement and research process helped me to develop my own mechanisms to convey my ideas with more clarity and consistency. They also gave me the opportunity to develop my own mechanisms to generate original ideas, search for evidences and look for opportunities to improve them.
Thanks to the Practicum course and later Synthesis I have developed more efficient ways to organize my time, research materials, computer access, and bibliographies than I did in the past. The documentation, compilation, organization and research of materials have progressively become a habit for me and I am pleased because they will help me in future projects, including when working on my documentaries.
I turned the obstacle of avoiding documentaries into the opportunity to watch them and evaluate the results of such experience. Using myself as an instrument to identify aspects of the documentaries that appeal my cognitive and emotional capacities was a good way to start pointing to the resources documentaries could use to transfer a vision more effectively.
The relationships I have developed in class contributed to my process. I knew I was not alone in my journey. Being able to get advice when I needed it made me ready to give it when I was asked for it. Sharing my project with others was very useful because every person, with whom I shared it, gave valuable perspectives to my project and made me reflect about the way I take my project. They also helped me formulate inquires that would clarify my project’s further direction and made me use my time more efficiently. The revision process was very valuable thanks to my instructor, my readers and other volunteers who read my paper and saw what I didn’t see. With their help I could identify and fix the redundancies my paper had and I could move forward.
My project has also directed me to the search for people like me who are in the process of developing their own mechanisms to produce documentaries that have better relations with the audience. I have also done some attempts to approach filmmakers who are consistently producing documentaries and who are trying to developed their own style and techniques. In the process of learning throughout other experiences I have joined the Women in Film & Video/New England, The Filmmakers Collaborative, the Center for Independent Documentary and the Latino American Studies Association and attended some film seminars and screenings organized by some of them.
In working from the foregoing architectural framework I designed for documentaries, I will have a foundation from which to produce films that are cognitively and emotionally balanced to generate both learning and enjoyment among the audience. This framework is not set in stone, but will serve as a dynamic foundation open to development and refinement as I learn more from both my experience and my audience.
Now I feel I am ready to fly, and put into practice what I have learned from this entire experience. The Critical and Creative Thinking program at UMASS Boston has given to me great perspective and taught me new ways to approach my creativity. I have gained a great deal from my interactions with instructors and classmates in a safe learning environment. Through creativity, risk taking, strategic planning, suspending judgment, dialogue, self-exploration and the making of new friends in this program, the research I have presented here is truly the result of a reflective practice endeavor, which I have greatly enjoyed and I am proud.