Last Monday, when Andrea and I showed Mr. Topf the first few parts of our video, he told us that he felt it was lacking that personal connection which would allow our audience to empathize with our documentary. He didn't want us to tell a story by simply cutting and pasting clips from the clients and enterprises we interviewed, he wanted us to tell a story by explaining what we had learned and then supporting it with interviews.
This is exactly what Ira Glass meant when he said that every good story has an anecdote and a moment of reflection. In this case, the anecdotes should come from the clients and enterprises we've interviewed, but the moment of reflection should be the conclusions Andrea and I have drawn from witnessing each of these anecdotes.
When Mr. Topf first told us that our voice wasn't truly heard in our documentary, I won't lie, I was pretty frustrated. We were working against the clock, and we had spent so much time perfecting our script, that I felt my work was simply going to waste. But a few days ago, Mr. Topf told us something that really stuck to me. He said that we shouldn't polish our work before we show it to others because it's most likely that we will F A I L. For someone like me--a perfectionist--that's more easily said than done, but it makes a lot of sense.
Think of a time in which you had to write an essay for a school assignment, and your teacher told you that the rough draft was due on Thursday. Most of us would probably aim to have our final draft due by this deadline, ignoring the fact that by doing so we are mentally closing ourselves from receiving constructive feedback. By showing others just our "final product" we hide the most important part, the process that we underwent to get there. We hide the crazy thoughts that may have ran through our minds (which may not be so crazy in the eyes of others) and the struggles that we had to overcome to reach our final product.
Plus, I think most of us can agree that the hardest part of receiving feedback once we're "done" is the thought of having to undo something we've spent hours doing. The cool thing about receiving feedback throughout the process is that we don't need to undo that much because we're working to fix things along the way.
So next time you're working on a big project, or like us, have an entire documentary to film and edit, don't wait until you're done with it to show it to someone, because the PROCESS of creating something is equally as important as the end PRODUCT, and that's something I've learned throughout this project.