I decided on analyzing Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi through a postcolonial lens because I thought it was the most fitting. Many of the characters experience times where they are challenged by colonizers as well as the aftermath of that. Not only did I think it was the most fitting, but it was the lens that interested me the most.
We started creating our essays by first writing our first paragraph that consisted of our thesis and main points we would try to argue.
Documentary
We created documentaries that showed how everyone has their own story and there is no single story.
Empathy Interviews The way we created our documentaries was by conducting empathy interviews. These were interviews where we practiced interviewing people using questions that were thought provoking, as to get the person to talk more about their story, as well as knowing when to stop pushing.
I Am Not Your Negro Before diving into the project my class went to see a documentary on James Baldwin called I Am Not Your Negro. This was a film about a civil rights activist who used his writing to really influence others. We went to see this movie to not only learn about James Baldwin, but to also learn about story telling since that is what we were about to do.
Script Writing Process I started my script by first going through all my footage of the interviews. From there I wrote down all the quotes I thought the person had said that were important. These quotes would go on to tell their story. Not only would it show their story, but it would show how even though everyone has their own story, everybody's crosses someone else's path, somewhere or somehow. After I figured out how I wanted to tell both of their stories, I added in things I would say that would tie everything together.
Things I ran into trouble with when drafting my script, was just making everything flow, figuring out what was unnecessary and what wasn't, and not having extremely long quotes. I fixed this issue by going over it many times with the help of my teacher, and re-reading it many times.
The original idea for this project consisted of working with partners and collaborating with them to end up with a documentary that told four different people's stories. However, it ended up just being a project of working on the documentary, without the collaboration of another person, and keeping the documentary to telling two different people's stories.