Documentary Critical Reflection

Ice Breaker

Documentary Critical Reflection

My documentary, Ice Breaker, was produced to convey the message of the inclusion of women in the male dominated sport, ice hockey.

My group members, Ana, Eugenia, and I had not conducted much research for this specific project, however, we already had research from our previous projects: our podcast and my portfolio project from last school year. For our podcast, we focused on the under representation of women in all sports and my portfolio project was specifically on hockey. Despite already knowing the females are underrepresented in hockey, the research confirmed this with numbers, percentages, and other first-hand accounts. We did not use this directly in our documentary because we wanted it to be more engaging and entertaining while using information from our interviews, instead of history of women in the sport. We were able to implement our research simply by producing this documentary and reinforcing what we found and learned in our research. For example, by including that there are only two girls on an all-boys team, as well as our interviews highlighting that sometimes girls are impacted by not being represented as much as boys, shows this. After hearing from my peers, they enjoyed how we showed the friendships created on the team and would have liked to see more of the off-ice bonding.

Ice Breaker heavily relies on the representation of social groups and issues surrounding it. As previously mentioned, we focused on the underrepresentation of women in sports, which not only deals with a specific social group, but the issue from a worldview that women are underrepresented in other areas, too. I think that this documentary works towards not only enforcing the participation of women in sports, but also the idea that women can fit into any male-dominated area of life. For example, as I had included in part of my interview, I have been playing since I was six years old, and when I started to play there was no other girls on my team, or the whole league. I think that by highlighting the game more people will be drawn in as they see the entertainment of the sport, and by noticing that girls can play, too, all will be wanting to skate. Within our documentary, I enjoyed how we showed me tying my hair into a ponytail and that being a distinguishing factor showing that I am a girl playing amongst the boys. As much as the b-roll was important, I think that our interviews had an impact on the message of the documentary, especially with how highly everyone had been talking about girls in the sport. I liked how each talked about how the females on the team are an important part and even create a higher level of sportsmanship and connectivity between the team. 

The entertainment of hockey is a simple way for our audience to engage in our documentary. The fast-paced game with something always happening makes the sport that just more interesting. I feel like because of this aspect, it is hard for the audience to gear their focus somewhere else. From our critiques, our peers agreed and despite the topic being serious, it was still a fun watch. When editing the project, I really wanted to incorporate as much of the high intensity game as possible. However, based on critiques, I could have created a few gaps in between the b-roll and interviews to slow down the production and it make it easier to watch. We had a lot of b-roll of the game itself, which I wanted to include a lot of. Although I did not plan to include voiceover at all throughout the documentary, we did not have enough from our interviewees that would match with what we wanted to include, however, in the places that we used a voiceover the visuals were for the most part continuing to engage the audience. We received critiques that the voiceover probably would not have been needed because the visuals told enough of a story.  A big part of the documentary that I did not enjoy was the audio being off for some of the clips. This was an issue that I tried my best to fix, but ultimately did not have the time to do so. I think that this was definitely not engaging for the audience and from critiques, my peers agreed that this was an issue, and hope to fix that issue moving forward.

   

Overall, I think that our project was visually pleasing and established that if females desire to play hockey, they most definitely should.